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THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

ROBERT SHENSTONE, A Novel 
AMERICA and OTHER POEMS 



THE FATHER 
OF A SOLDIER 



W^^;' DAWSON 

AUTHOR OF 

"ROBERT SHENSTONE," 

'AMERICA AND OTHER POEMS," ETC 



NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY .'. MCMXVIII 






Copyright, 1918 
By John Lane Company 



%^ 25 1918 



A494296 



LETTER FROM LIEUTENANT 
CONINGSBY DAWSON 

Mid-Ocean, October 2pth, igij. 
Dear Father: 

Here I am, sailing to the trenches for a third 
time — and there are you, having once again gone 
through the brave ordeal of bidding me " Good- 
bye- 

You urged me while I was with you for that 
brief handful of weeks in America to write a 
book. You said that you were sure that I had 
something quite different from anybody else to 
say. So, obeying you as I always have done, I 
spent the bulk of m.y leave in that little familiar 
study at the top of the house, pretending that the 
war was over and that I was no longer only a 
subaltern, but a literary man again. 

Now I want you to obey me — it'll be the first 
time — just for once. I want you, too, to write 
a book, for I believe that you also have some- 
thing utterly unique to say. 

Do you remember the Urst time I told you that 
I had m^e up my mind ta be a soldierf Da 

5 



6 LETTER 

you remember how you took the news? What 
cowards we were in those days! And now recall 
last January, when you met me in London for my 
short ten days' respite from the trenches. What 
a wildly good time we had! Did any people ever 
pack more joy into ten days? They ended; you 
came to see me go aboard the boat which would 
carry me back to the mud and the danger. I 
asked you a question then. "If you knew that 
I was to be killed within the next month j would 
you rather I went or stayed?" "Much rather, 
you went," you said proudly. That zvas the an- 
swer of the father of a soldier — not the answer 
you would have given me when first I joined. 
What has happened to change you? 

There are fathers in America who are soon to 
become the fathers of soldiers. They're like you 
were at first; they're only feeling the sorrow now 
— they don't know that the pride will come. I 
want you to write a book for them especially, — 
a book for the future fathers of soldiers such as 
one who is already the father of a soldier should 
write. Tell them how to bear up; let them knoiv 
that they're soldiers, too — the braver kind of 
soldiers who are left behind. Please do it — I 
want you to do it. 

Yours very lovingly, 

CON. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Higher Choice (poem) lo 

The Partings n 

The PEOPLE'S Cause (poem) 26 

The First Vision of War 27 

De Profundis (poem) 52 

The Growing Fear 53 

When Heroes Die (poem) 80 

The Second Vision of War .... 81 

The Comrade Heart (poem) 106 

The Education of a Father . . .107 
The Day After To-morrow (poem) . . 136 
The Happy Warrior 137 



THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 



THE HIGHER CHOICE 

At last the tragic hour arrives: 
Wilt thou he faithful to thy soul 

And live the only life that lives, 
Or that which mortals call the whole f 

In thee, behind all smiles and mirth. 
There lurks in being's inmost cell 

A Power, a something not of earth. 
Steadfast, serene, unconquerable. 

Thou recognisest life and death. 
Thou movest in thy right of will. 

Subdued by love, yet with free breath 
Obeying higher promptings still. 

This is the Power I cannot touch, 
Which flashes on me unsubdued. 

Nor should I love thee half so much. 
Nor half so deeply, if I could. 

That thou art mine is partly true. 
With me thou art content to dwell; 

A closer vision tell me, too, 

That thou art wholly God's as well* 



THE PARTINGS 



I have just returned from the Docks, and have 
seen my son off for his third trip to the trenches. 

Beside the landing stage lay a ship strangely 
camouflaged, as if a company of cubist artists had 
been at work upon her. She looked like an old 
lady of sober habits, who had been caught in the 
madness of carnival, and dressed as a zany. She 
was adorned — or disfigured — by stripes of 
colour that ran in all directions, splashings of 
green, splotches of grey, curves of dull red, all 
mixed in uttermost confusion and with no dis- 
cernible design. I was told that this extraordi- 
nary appearance was designed to give the ship 
invisibility: thus clothed she would flee like a 
ghost over the grey perilous waters, a phantom 
thing of blurred outlines, as if evoked from the 
waters themselves. 

There was none of the cheerful bustle one 
usually sees on a departing ship. Tired men, 
with keen, searching eyes, stood at the gangways, 
scrutinising each passenger as he came aboard. 

II 



12 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

There were very few passengers — a little group 
of officers in khaki, a haggard-eyed elderly man 
who carried a conspicuous portfolio, and two 
women in black, cheerfully adorned in the Ameri- 
can fashion with large bunches of violets fas- 
tened to their waists. At a little distance from 
the gangway, sitting on a bale of merchandise, 
was an American soldier and his wife. She was 
quite young, wath fair, wheat-coloured hair; her 
face was pale and drawn, and her fingers twitched 
as she talked. Those twitching fingers were 
never still. They beat a tattoo on the bale, opened 
and closed spasmodically, pushed back a strand 
of the fair hair that fell over her forehead, fixed 
themselves on a button of her husband's tunic. 
She did not weep; she looked as if she had ex- 
hausted the power of weeping. Her husband 
talked rapidly and softly, with a fixed smile upon 
his face. I guessed that he was counselling a 
cheerfulness which he himself did not possess. 

From this same dock I had seen this same ship 
sail more than once. In those other days, which 
I recalled, there had been a cheerful crowd, to 
the last moment shouting messages and congratu- 
lations. Great boxes of flowers had been car- 
ried aboard; small American flags had been 
waved; once I remember, a band had played in 
the moment of departure. To-day there was a 



THE PARTINGS 13 

grim, brooding silence. There was an air of 
stealth and secrecy that made one speak in whis- 
pers. The smart cheerful sailors, who used to 
stand at attention, waiting for the word to cast 
off, had vanished. The young, alert, white- 
jacketed stewards were represented by two white- 
haired men, who moved slowly and rarely lifted 
their eyes from the ground. The decks, once im- 
maculately clean, were littered and dirty. Over 
them rose those strange ring-straked masts and 
funnels, pitifully absurd as a decent citizen might 
be, if forced to stand upon a pillory in the cloth- 
ing of a clown. At the bows two long ring- 
straked guns thrust out their formidable snouts. 
At the stern, the bulwarks were cut away, and 
another gun pointed to the Jersey coast. They 
explained the entire scene. America was at war. 

On the stroke of the hour the gang-plank was 
swung up, and the little crowd began to disperse. 
My son looked very lonely as he stood beside the 
deck-house, watching us. But he stood erect, 
and presently raised his hand in a military salute. 
It was his sign to us that we had better go. He 
did not wish us to wait till the ship moved out of 
dock, watching her till she faded in the distance. 

" It only makes it harder for us all," he said ; 
" and I don't want you to break down. Go away 
as soon as the gang-plank is up, but don't go 



14 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

straight home. Get your lunch in New York, 
and let it be a good lunch. It won't be so hard 
to go back to the house after lunch, as if you went 
direct from the dock. And don't worry about 
me. I shall be all right." 

So we turned away and walked slowly down 
the long empty resounding room. We stopped at 
the top of the stairs, thinking we might hear the 
siren sound, as the ship swung seaward; then 
we remembered that it was war-time, and she 
would sail in silence. She would melt out into 
the mystery of the sea, desirous only to escape 
observation. There would be no wireless mes- 
sage, as in other days from that one dear traveller 
who took our hearts with him. Swift as a hound 
pursued by peril, silent as a shadow, she would 
glide through the days and nights of sea, toward 
that world of war that seemed so unreal as we 
looked on the secure magnificence of New York, 
the busy river, and the warm sunlight that still 
held the benison of summer. 

No messages ? — Yes, there was one. When 
we reached home a huge box of flowers awaited 
us. They lit up the lonely house with colour, and 
filled it with perfume. They were the last ex- 
pression of our son's thoughtfulness for us. He 
would not have us come back to a cheerless home ; 
and as we arranged the flowers in all the vases 



THE PARTINGS 15 

we possessed no doubt he was thinking of us, and 
picturing to himself our surprise and pleasure. 



II 

This is the third time we have parted with him 
since the war began. 

The first time was at a military camp in Can- 
ada. It was an artillery camp, situated on a wide 
sandy bluff above the Ottawa River, which was 
here broad as a lake. Two miles, across the 
water, facing the camp, was a long, low, rambling 
Hotel at which we stayed. From the verandah 
of the Hotel we could see the white tents of the 
camp, and at night we watched the flash of guns, 
and heard the shells burst upon their hidden tar- 
gets. The Hotel was packed with the wives of 
officers, and during the day I was the only man 
among the guests. A primitive ferry-boat, mak- 
ing far more racket than an ocean-liner, plied 
irregularly between the camp and the Hotel. 
Every evening officers came over to dinner, and 
now and then there was a dance in a long, dimly 
lit out-building, thronged with mosquitoes. Once 
there was a soldiers' concert, and a very creditable 
showing these lads in khaki made, for there were 
excellent actors and singers among them. 

I had never been in contact with soldiers, and, 



i6 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

until I came to the camp, I had never seen my son 
in uniform. I will confess to the pride I felt 
when he met us, and I was conscious of a great 
change in him. The long months of training, the 
open-air life, the regular habits of a camp, had 
obviously resulted in a kind of physical regenera- 
tion. He seemed taller, fuller in the chest, better 
poised; he moved with a firm step, and had ac- 
quired an air of decision and authority. 

I came to know the women in the Hotel with 
some intimacy, for during the long hours of those 
summer days we were naturally thrown much to- 
gether. I learned their histories. Their hus- 
bands had been doctors, lawyers and business men 
before the war. They had been able to give their 
wives good homes, and in some cases a degree of 
comfort which approached modest luxury. 
When they enlisted, in most cases, these means of 
livelihood were at an end or greatly reduced. 
Homes had been given up, servants dismissed, 
furniture sold, and children sent to the care of 
relatives. Yet I never heard one of these women 
complain of the sacrifices she had made. They 
were uniformly cheerful, quiet and courageous. 
They talked of their narrowed means with a kind 
of ironic gaiety, and made fun of the business of 
re-making old dresses, and refurbishing unfash- 
ionable finery. They swam daily in the lake — 



THE PARTINGS 17 

some of them were splendid swimmers — made 
clothes, and were always ready for a dance at 
night. I heard a whisper of tears shed secretly 
in bedrooms over midnight tea-makings, when the 
men had gone back to camp ; but if there was sor- 
row it was private and very carefully concealed. 

When the first surprise of a novel situation was 
abated, we settled down to our life as if it were 
merely a new kind of summer holiday. My son 
had hired a launch, in which we made many pleas- 
ant excursions in the upper reaches of the river, 
where it flowed between nobly wooded cliffs. We 
visited the camp, drank tea with this and that 
officer, talked of books or listened to camp gossip ; 
but the war was very rarely mentioned or dis- 
cussed. It looked as if there was a tacit under- 
standing that it should be avoided. Every man 
was quietly prepared to do his bit when the hour 
came, but each knew that the chance of active 
service was precarious. They might go to-mor- 
row, they might go in a year ; no one could tell : 
and this uncertainty made anticipation foolish. 
Now and again a small body of men left the camp. 
One night about a hundred went. They swung 
down the long sandy road, in the bright moon- 
light singing " Keep the home-fires burning till 
the boys come home." But the camp next day 
looked quite unaltered. They day's routine went 



i8 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

on as usual. The very fact that a hundred men 
had gone made it all the more unlikely that an- 
other call would be made immediately. When 
once we realise that happiness is precarious we 
cease to think of its possible loss. We live in the 
moment, and ignore the future. Perhaps we live 
even more intensely. But we certainly forget 
that what we regard as a stable condition is really 
unstable, just as the fact of the brevity of Hfe it- 
self, absolutely known as it is, does not prevent us 
from living as though life never ended. 

So the days passed, the long summer days ; and 
although the signs of war were obvious enough, 
the reality of war was not apprehended. The 
guns that fired each night became as integral a 
part of the daily spectacle as the red flames of sun- 
set that burned behind the wooded islands, or the 
aurora that played faintly on warm nights across 
the northern skies. 

Then, with a startling suddenness, as though a 
gong had struck, the blow fell. We had gone 
over to the camp in our launch one afternoon to 
meet our son, and bring him back to dinner at our 
little inn. He was late, and we lay beside the 
wharf idly watching the soldiers swimming in the 
lake, and thinking how picturesque the scene was. 
The white bodies of the men flashed in the sun, 
horses splashed in the shallows, a bugle called in 



THE PARTINGS 19 

the camp above the hill. We heard voices in the 
woods, and footsteps on the steep sandy road that 
climbed through the woods to the camp. A mo- 
ment later he appeared. 

'' Well, it has come," he said quietly. 

" What has come? What do you mean? " we 
cried. 

" I go in a week. They've asked for artillery 
officers to go at once to the Front, to replace 
casualties ; I've volunteered and been accepted." 

A few days later he went. We had our last 
dinner together in the Hotel, and all the folk 
came down to the wharf with us. An old Major 
— he was sixty-two — tried to console us with 
the assurance that the war was nearly over, and 
would end long before my son could reach the 
Front. We did not believe him, and he knew 
that he did not believe himself ; but his innocent 
falsehood passed uncontradicted. The ferry- 
boat, dark as King Arthur's barge, lay against the 
wharf. It was soon filled with men, standing 
shoulder to shoulder, and quite silent. A hun- 
dred yards from the shadowy wharf the moon 
made a broad road of silver on the water. The 
boat moved off. As it passed into that road of 
silver the men began to sing. I don't remember 
what they sung : I think it was " Keep the home- 
fires burning till the Boys come home." It dis- 



20 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

appeared in the darkness beyond that silver road, 
and the sound of singing voices died away. 

A day later the train bore us westward. It 
was five o'clock in the morning when we passed 
the camp. I looked out, and saw the white tents, 
the rutted roads, and a long string of men riding 
slowly against the morning sky. I think I never 
felt so keen a sense of emptiness and desolation. 

That w^as the first parting. 

Ill 

The second parting was some months later. 

For four months our son had been at the Front, 
he had come to England on leave, and was re- 
turning. The ten wonderful days in London, 
which we had crossed from America to share 
with him, were over, and we stood at the dock 
gates in Folkestone. 

We were not allowed to go further. A stafif 
officer drove up to the gates with his wife, and 
was courteously stopped. His last farewells were 
made behind the curtains of his automobile, and 
his wife drove back alone. 

No ship was visible. The great empty space 
within the dock-gates, lay glittering in the winter 
sun. A bitter wind was blowing. In the ex- 
treme distance, behind a long building, we saw a 



THE PARTINGS 21 

pennon fluttering and a thin feather of steam sail- 
ing up into the sky and dissolving there. 

'' I think it is about time, sir," said the sentry 
at the gate. 

It was then that my son turned to me, and 
asked the question which he himself has recorded. 

"If you knew that I was going to be killed 
within the next month, would you rather I went 
or stayed? " 

" Much rather you went," I answered. 

There were three of us standing there with him 
in that bleak winter parting — his mother, his 
sister, and myself. It was their answer as well as 
mine. I knew that, and he knew it. We all felt 
alike. 

Our home lay three thousand miles away. He 
was going back to a peril that we now fully com- 
prehended, we to a house whose loneliness we 
had experienced. But some uplifting Power was 
with us in that moment, and by virtue of that 
Power we answered as we did that heart-rending 
question. 

We embraced once more. He turned from us 
immediately, and marched proudly to the hidden 
ship. He looked back once and waved his hand, 
and disappeared. We walked away slowly, and 
returned that night to a London that had sud- 
denly become unutterably dismal. 



22 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

" How is the city desolate that was full of chil- 
dren!" cried Dante of Florence, when all that 
he had loved in Florence was taken from him. 
It was so we felt that night in London. 

And that was the second parting. 



IV 

There was another parting, which predates 
these I have mentioned. It took place not at a 
camp or dock, but in my own house. On a dim 
January afternoon we sat at our last meal before 
my son took train for Kingston, where he was to 
receive training as an artillery officer. 

We were all unhappy. The son who had lived 
with us so many years, with whom I had worked 
so often in common literary tasks, whose gentle- 
ness of mind and rare consideration had made 
the happiest element in our lives, was going away 
to unknown tasks and duties. He was being vio- 
lently wrenched from us, as by a brutal and 
strong hand. The fine efficiency, which he had 
won with so many years of effort, was to be dis- 
carded. He was going to a kind of life in which 
all this fine efficiency was valueless. He was 
about to begin life again upon what seemed an 
infinitely lower scale. It was as though a great 
artist should be set to paint sign-posts, a Toledo 



THE PARTINGS 2^ 

blade of finest temper should be used to chop 
wood. The irony, the bitterness of the thing 
seized upon me, and I cried, " What I can't stand 
is the damnable waste of it all." 

I ought not to have said it, for I knew that it 
would hurt him. But the cry was involuntary. 
It sprang from an overwhelming pain. For 
months I had been upon the rack, foreseeing his 
decision and dreading it. I had tried to see 
things from his point of view and had failed. I 
could see nothing but the waste of rare powers 
which war demanded, and my cry was in reality 
a protest against the undiscriminating heartless- 
ness of war itself. 

The point then that I wish to make is now 
plain. The person who spoke beside the dock- 
gates at Folkestone was certainly not the person 
who spoke that January afternoon in my house 
at Newark. They are separated by more than a 
hemisphere. They speak a different language. 
They think upon a different plane. 

The father who said farewell to his son on 
that dark wharf upon the Ottawa has a certain 
likeness to the father who turned from the dock 
in New York dry-eyed but yesterday. But here 
too there is a wide disparity. On that night of 
parting at the camp, I was sustained by illusion. 
I was ready to believe that going to England did 



24 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

not mean necessarily going to France. My son 
might not see fighting after all, and I devoutly 
hoped he would not. But beside the dock at 
Folkestone and the wharf at New York, I was 
sustained by no illusions. I knew now the real- 
ity of war. My son had endured its horrors. 
He had fought behind a barricade of corpses. 
He had lived in a miserable dug-out, roofed with 
the dead. He had been wounded, had nearly lost 
his right arm, had been for two months in hos- 
pital. He had escaped death almost by miracle. 

He was going back to it all, and going back to 
a harder fight than he had ever known. He 
would, again spend bitter nights of cold at the 
observation post, take his guns in under fire, be 
exposed to the flying death of shrapnel, the chance 
of mutilation, the contamination of disease. I 
knew it all : the dreadful panorama of battle was 
vivid to me from his own description; illusion 
was impossible, yet from my heart I could say 
that I had rather a thousandfold that he should 
go back than remain at home in an ignoble safety. 

Here is surely a surprising evolution. It has 
come unsought. It is a growth, not the difificult 
achievement of deliberate effort. While we try 
to shape our own lives, they are shaped for us ; 
while we work, we are worked upon. A new set 
of forces have played upon my life, and I know 



THE PARTINGS 25 

myself changed. The same forces are working 
at this hour on multitudes round about me. They 
are equally unsought; perhaps equally uncompre- 
hended and unwelcomed. 

It is very confusing for a man whose entire 
concept of life has been pacific to find himself 
the father of a soldier. It is still more surpris- 
ing that he should find himself in most intimate 
agreement with his son. Yet in all evolution 
there is order, discernible process, definite devel- 
opment. I see now, what I could not see while 
the separate elements of the process were at 
work, that the total process has been orderly. I 
have moved by definite stages to a new develop- 
ment, a new temper, a new view of life. I wish 
now to trace these stages, not for my own satis- 
faction only, but that I may possibly be of help 
to others, who may learn through my experience 
whither their own experience is leading them. 
The whole world is being fashioned anew, and in 
this remoulding of human thought parents par- 
ticipate as well as sons. The son becomes a new 
kind of son when he is a soldier, and the father 
must needs become a new kind of father. 



THE PEOPLES CAUSE 

O People, must the tale run on the same, 

Thro' all the generations, soon and late. 
The lamentations of a fruitless shame, 

The broken armies bowed to meet their fate? 
Is all in vain — the flaming barricade. 

The Cross, the gallows, the red guillotine. 
And all your marred redeemers, each one made 

A sacrifice for thy new sloth and sin? 
When will ye come, no more disconsolate, 

With banners terrible, and feet of flame. 
Treading the wine-press of the grapes of wrath. 

In purple raiment, travelling in your might, 
With Him Who long since trod the self-same path. 

And died in darkness that you might have light? 

O People, shall these lesser Kings of clay 

Once more weld cruel chains about your feet? 
Shall lords of Mammon your great progress stay. 

Or counsel you with craft to vile retreat? 
Great Rome, with all her legions, slew you not. 

Proud Paris kissed for peace your brows blood-hued. 
You IV ere not crushed by Ccesar's chariot; 

With Jesus crucified, in life renewed 
You lived again. And shall you fear to greet 

The flaming pennon of your ultimate day. 
Bought with a little gold to serve the lust 

Of those who build an empire on your pain? 
Once more the Spirit stirs the bones of dust, 

O ye dry bones, let Him not call in vain. 

(From "America and Other Poems.") 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 



My mind goes back to the summer of 19 14. 

This year had been the wonderful year of our 
lives. As a family, we had known some vicis- 
situdes, but we had now passed through all the 
broken waters, and were afloat upon a bright and 
placid stream. June found us all together upon 
our ranch in British Columbia. We planned to 
remain there a month, and then sail for England. 
It was an extravagant holiday, but things had 
happened to us which deserved our unusual cele- 
bration* 

The ranch was actually the creation of my sec- 
ond son, Reginald. He had gone to it almost a 
boy, fresh from college, without the least expe- 
rience of physical toil. When he first saw it, it 
was wild bush, with not more than an acre cleared 
and cultivated. Up the lake, which was to us in 
those summer days so great a pleasure, he had 
rowed one dark night in a leaky boat, with the 
vaguest surmise of what he was to find. A 
friendly rancher gave him shelter for the night, 

27 



28 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

and bluntly expressed the opinion that he would 
never " stick it." He explored his little king- 
dom next day, wading through cedar swamps, 
and climbing over fallen forest trees. His first 
job was to build a frail shack which must be his 
home. The isolation and the loneliness of the 
scene were dismaying. Bears were heard quarrel- 
ling in the woods, on the winter nights the coyotes 
cried like women in mortal pain, and it was no 
unusual circumstance to be followed by the soft 
stealthy pad of the mountain-lion as one climbed 
the trail at night. Nevertheless, he " stuck it,'* 
and not till long afterwards did we know the 
hardness of his first experience. 

Since these days a miracle had been wrought 
by the simple magic of indomitable courage. The 
forests had been felled, the swamps drained, and 
acre after acre added to the ranch. Its very soil 
had become sacred to us all by these labours. We 
loved it for its beauty, but much more for the 
precious treasure of youth which had passed into 
its soil and hallowed it. In course of time my 
youngest son, Eric, came to the same district to 
be near his brother. He was studying law in the 
neighbouring town of Nelson, at the foot of the 
lake. So, then, the situation may be conceived. 
The summer brought a re-union very rare in fam- 
ily life. Even with the plan to visit England duly 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 29 

laid, we, who lived three thousand miles away, 
could not forego our visit to the ranch. We 
hastened to it, my wife, my daughter, myself, 
and this year my eldest son, with winged feet. 

The summer days passed in joyous pageant. 
One plain log-house sheltered us, and our life 
w^as primitive in the extreme. We all realised 
the truth of the classic fable, that he who touches 
his mother earth, draws new strength from her 
embrace. There was boating in the lake, contin- 
ual swimming, and excursions into the wild hills, 
which had known no change for centuries, and the 
foot of man but rarely. In the early morning 
Eric rode into town; as the sunset washed the 
hills with crimson, we waited for the sound of 
his horse's hoofs upon the road, and found our 
happiness complete with his arrival. We each 
felt that we had attained, after many trials, a 
complete and harmonious plan of life. The 
ranch itself, no longer swamp and forest, but 
clothed in orchards, was the symbol of achieve- 
ment. Thus would we meet each year, here 
should the family bond be drawn closer by com- 
mon pleasure, and the intimate communion of 
mind with mind, based on common memories and 
affections. Here should books be planned and 
written, our various schemes of life discussed, 
our simple festivals of love be celebrated. So 



30 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

we talked and planned, not knowing that this was 
the last occasion when we should be all together 
on the ranch — that to-day it would be uninhab- 
ited and derelict. 

One day the idea suddenly took shape that 
Reginald should come with us to England. We 
had never thought of this as possible, but in our 
existing mood of high spirits all things were pos- 
sible. His eldest brother insisted on it: his 
youngest, foreseeing his own solitude, was un- 
selfishly urgent that he should go. He had de- 
served it, but in the constant self-denials of his 
life, he was not accustomed to think much of 
his deserts. It was ten years since he had left 
England. We had all been back, but he had not 
seen her green shores since he left them as a lad 
of eighteen. Instantly there was wild riding to 
and fro, to find some one who would look after 
things in his absence. A suitable overseer was 
found. The good luck was so incredible that I 
think he only half believed it true, until the hour 
when his valise was packed, and lay upon the 
wharf waiting for the steamer. For myself, I 
had scarcely thought to see England again; at 
least, not for many years. I had a private rea- 
son, which I knew to be unreasonable, yet it was 
very real to me. I had always intended taking 
my youngest child to England with me when next 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 31 

I went; but I had delayed too long. She was 
dead, and I felt as though I had not acted fairly 
by her. But even that morbid sorrow seemed 
to dissolve at last in the joy of this united pil- 
grimage to the dear home land. God had given 
us so much that summer that I could not but be 
grateful, nor could I permit the private accusa- 
tions of a wounded heart to spoil the joy of 
others. 

So then, I say again, conceive the situation. 
Our lives had touched a fine excess of happiness. 
We were much too absorbed in it to be greatly 
interested by outside affairs. The daily paper 
was flung aside, almost unread. Our casual eyes 
remarked nothing of importance in external 
events. We were going to England, going to- 
gether, all but one of us — nothing in the world 
could equal the significance of that event. And 
yet, in those very days, unremarked by us, events 
were happening that were to touch our lives to 
the very core, alter the current of our thoughts, 
and re-shape our characters to an undiscerned 
design. 

II 

An Archduke had been murdered somewhere 
in the Balkans. Let the fact be stated with cir- 
cumstantial accuracy : " Archduke Franz Ferdi- 



32 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

nand, heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, and 
the Archduchess Sophie Chotek were assassinated 
to-day at Serajevo, capital of the Austro-Hun- 
garian province of Bosnia, by a Bosnian student, 
Gavrio Prinzip." 

So read the paragraph that was flashed round 
the world on a June morning of 19 14. 

It seemed of very small importance to the 
world that an Archduke had disappeared. Cer- 
tainly it was an event totally unrelated to my own 
humble existence. Who could have foreseen 
that a Hoody hand would presently thrust itself 
up out of Serajevo, a hand with vast, groping, 
cruel fingers that was to pluck twenty million 
men out of homes and lands, and fling them, un- 
resisting, into the vile Aceldema of War? 

Had such a prophecy been made in those last 
days of June, 19 14, it would not have been be- 
lieved. Least of all by me, for I had come to 
think of war as an anachronism. I was not a 
pacifist in the usual sense of the term. I thought 
Tolstoi's doctrine of non-resistance nonsense, and 
I was unwilling to admit that war was at all times 
and on all occasions incompatible with Christian- 
ity. I could conceive a just war, but I could not 
conceive the injustice that would provoke it. 
Time had taught men many lessons, the chief of 
which was to replace force by reason and passion 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 33 

by the useful wisdom of mutual advantage. The 
mind of man, more highly rationalised with each 
generation, had inevitably moved away from war, 
which was the supreme unreason. Arbitration 
was the new word of statesmanship, and the Peace 
Palace at The Hague was its symbol. 

So I supposed, as all rational men supposed in 
the summer of 19 14, that the murder of an Arch- 
duke in Serajevo was an incident of no general 
significance. Nor was I alarmed when threats 
of revenge, which slowly grew into the menacing 
voice of War, began to be heard. There was 
always trouble in the Balkans, as Kipling had re- 
minded us in one of his books, and it usually 
came to nothing. Besides, I had other things to 
think of. Our trip to England was not to be 
postponed by obscure conditions in the Balkans: 
our berths were already booked on a Canadian 
steamer. We started on the appointed day, trav- 
elling across the entire breadth of Canada to 
Quebec, from which port we were to sail. 

It was in the last days of July when we be- 
gan that six days' journey across Canada. By 
this time we had begun to realise that war was 
imminent, and that there was a remote possi- 
bility that England might be involved. As we 
sped eastward, that distant voice of war began 
to swell louder, like a thunder-storm that was 



34 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

determined to outrace us. There were moments 
when I could fancy that bloody hand, with cruel, 
groping fingers, pushing itself up above the 
mountains, in growing menace. Prudence sug- 
gested that it might be unwise to go on. If Eng- 
land were drawn into war it was highly prob- 
able that we should reach Quebec only to discover 
that no ship was allowed to sail. But we were 
possessed by an obstinate thirst for happiness 
which discounted our reasonable fears. It was 
just then the most important thing in life for 
us that we should see England, and see it to- 
gether, as we had so long dreamed of doing, and 
we were not to be deterred by so small a thing 
as the murder of an Archduke at Serajevo. 

We could get little news upon our journey. 
The news service on the train was suspended. 
Local papers were hard to get, and were of lit- 
tle use. At Winnipeg, where we confidently an- 
ticipated accurate information, the news-stalls 
were closed, no paper was obtainable, and not so 
much as a telegram was posted on the bulletin 
board. We had forgotten that it was Sunday, 
and that Winnipeg kept the Sabbath with exem- 
plary strictness. At last we reached Montreal, 
and there the real truth met us that England had 
declared war on Germany. We reached Quebec 
the same evening. The streets were thronged, 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 35 

bands were playing, the Marseillaise was being 
sung everywhere, and orators, both French and 
English, were addressing shouting crowds from 
the base of Champlain's monument. Of course 
the sailing of our ship was postponed, and there 
was nothing to do but wait events. We drove 
about the city, visited the Falls of Montmorency, 
walked upon the Heights of Abraham, talked of 
the death of Wolfe, and drew from his heroic 
history pleasant conclusions on the might of Eng- 
land and the traditional glory of her armies. 
All the time we were profoundly uneasy, not over 
public events, but the precariousness of our own 
plans. It became a matter of eager debate 
whether or no we should give up our trip. Ger- 
man cruisers were reported in the Atlantic, and 
I drew a very convincing picture of myself and 
my family captured and held as prisoners of 
war. We actually went so far as to drive to the 
shipping office to cancel our tickets. We did not 
do so because at that very moment a lying tele- 
gram, called official, was posted in the Hotel and 
circulated in the city, announcing that the Brit- 
ish Fleet had met the German, destroying eighteen 
battleships, and capturing as many more, besides 
an incredible number of cruisers and torpedo 
boats. Who originated this gigantic falsehood 
and how it came to be stamped official, are mys- 



Z6 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

teries unsolved to this day. Of course we be- 
lieved it. Apparently the shipping authorities be- 
lieved it too, for late at night we went aboard 
our boat, and in the hot still dawn of the next 
day, she put out to sea. 

We crossed in perfect safety, and, thanks to 
that lying telegram, without a single uneasy 
thought. In those long sunny days and warm 
starry nights at sea, we came almost to think the 
fact of war, made so patent to us in Quebec, was 
a delusion. True, the ship was painted grey, no 
lights were shown at night, and we were run- 
ning sixty miles out of our course, but life on 
ship-board retained its customary air of security 
and pleasure. There was the usual cheerful in- 
tercourse among the passengers ; there were deck- 
sports and games, and an admirable concert given 
by members of the crew, in which the comic ele- 
ment prevailed. There were a few military men 
aboard, but they were the most unconcerned of 
all the passengers; they showed themselves par- 
ticularly keen on the deck-sports, but they were 
quite silent about the war. One old Major-Gen- 
eral, who had served in the South African war, 
was alone communicative. He was quite sure 
that the defeat of Germany would be rapid and 
complete. One thing he said was in the nature 
of a prophecy. 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 37 

" We learned one thing from the Boer War," 
he said; *' the value of open formation. Ger- 
many has never learned it. You mark my words, 
she will attack in close formation. She depends 
on mass attacks." 

His words gave me a comfortable sense of the 
superiority of British strategy, and my confidence 
was strengthened when he remarked that the only 
nation with any actual experience of modern 
war was the British, which was always more or 
less at war, whereas Germany had not fired a 
gun since 1870. 

" Then you think the war won't last lotig? '* 
I said. 

" Oh, no, it cannot. It is Impossible for Ger- 
many to stand up against Great Britain, France 
and Russia. The Franco-Prussian War only 
lasted six weeks. This may be even shorter." 

I saw my two sons on the forward deck en- 
gaged in a game of deck-quoits, and I remem- 
bered the Boer War when the C. I. V.s were 
recruited in London, and many youths I knew 
among them. 

*' Then you don't think there will be any gen- 
eral recruiting? " I asked. 

" Oh, dear, no. This isn't like the Boer War, 
when w^e fought alone. We have France and 
Russia with us. And besides, remember the 



38 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

British Expeditionary Force will be the very pick 
of the army, and they'll do their job all right." 

He smiled proudly, and because he was old and 
experienced I believed him. 

Why trouble about the future? The sun 
shone bright, the sea flowed in rippling azure, 
the Irish coast was looming up, and to the star- 
board lay two long grey British cruisers, flying 
the flag that had never known defeat. Eng- 
land, the forsaken but un forgotten land of a thou- 
sand happy memories ; England, the beloved and 
long-desired, lay just beyond that faint pale mist, 
and by nightfall we should reach it. Even now, 
it might be, she had struck her victorious blow 
on the land, as she had already done upon the 
sea. 

And there was no one to tell me that my 
friendly Major-General's gay prognostications 
had as little base in fact as that lying telegram in 
the Hotel lobby at Quebec. 

Ill 

I look back at that England of August, 19 14, 
with surprise and wonder. In a single moment 
all her destinies had been staked upon the cast of 
war, but she did not seem to be aware of it. Her 
life was moving stolidly in the deep ruts made by 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 39 

long years of peace. Liverpool glittered with 
a thousand lights through the veils of murk, 
crowded ferry-boats were running to and fro, the 
great lighted train waited to convey the ocean 
traveller to London. I was ODnscious of no ten- 
sion in the air. The papers gave their front 
pages to the war, but the great space allotted to 
sports was not abridged. Men went about their 
ordinary business in the ordinary way, cheerful, 
imperturbable, good-humoured, apparently uncon- 
scious of peril, or proudly ignoring it. I gath- 
ered the impression that for the average man the 
war was merely an incident. 

Some one had started the watchword, " Busi- 
ness as usual." There must have been something 
in it that appealed to British doggedness, for it 
was generally adopted. On most men's lips it 
implied a complete half -humorous contempt of 
Germany. In one Cathedral city which I visited 
a patriotic baker had improved upon the motto. 
He was executing some repairs in his shop, and 
hung out a board on which the caption was dis- 
played, " Business as usual, during the extension 
of the British Empire." I have no doubt he was 
a very stupid man, who knew as little of the 
British Empire as he did of Germany, but I 
could not deny him the virtue of chuckle-headed 
courage. He was certainly representative and 



40 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

typical, for I met the same attitude among all 
sorts of men. They seemed to imagine that it 
would be a kind of cowardice to confess that 
things were serious, and an insult to suppose that 
they cared. A studied indifference to the war 
was their synonym for fortitude. 

The English attitude astonished me : as I look 
back I am not less astonished at my own. I was 
intelligent enough to know the war was serious, 
but I had no understanding of its real dimensions. 
I supposed it a war of armies, not of armed na- 
tions, as it proved to be. I was told on all sides 
that the English army had been trained to the 
highest point of efficiency, and of its valour there 
was no question. The same was true of the 
Navy. There was the dramatic story of how the 
vast fleet of England, assembled for the innocent 
purpose of an annual review, had melted away 
in a night, secretly warned of danger and cleverly 
directed to encounter it. There was the equally 
dramatic story of how in the dusk of a summer 
evening a great army had crossed the Channel 
unobserved, and was in the battle-line before the 
enemy knew that it had left England. These 
things encouraged optimism. They gave proof 
of the skill and vigilance of English statesmen. 
Perhaps the old Major-General was right when 
he said that the war would be brief Why 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 41 

worry about it? We had come to England for 
a definite purpose ; we were exiles returned, eager 
to renew acquaintance with old scenes and old 
friends, and there appeared to be no reason why 
we should not do so. If the shop-keeper's motto 
was business as usual, it was quite legitimate that 
the traveller's should be pleasure as usual. 

W^e hired an automobile, and for sixteen days 
toured England. We visited places dear and 
sacred to us by association, a house my father 
had inhabited in a remote Cornish town, the 
grave of a sister I had dearly loved in an old 
parish churchyard of the Midlands. We slept in 
ancient inns, with Tudor ceilings and Jacobean 
furniture, that had known the stately presences 
of Wolsey, Milton, Cromwell: and long before 
their days the feet of Chaucer's pilgrims, and 
the song of steel-clad Crusaders. We stopped in 
quaint villages hidden in green nooks above opal 
seas, Tintagel, Boscastle and Clovelly. The im- 
memorial peace of these delightful places was un- 
disturbed by the loud clamour of war. Life 
pursued its ancient courses, as it had done for 
centuries. The fishing-boats came and went upon 
the sea, the wheat was being stacked in the fields, 
and in the evening light the old labourer bent 
above his little garden or smoked his pipe in the 
rose-covered doorway of his cottage. If these 



42 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

simple folk talked at all of the war, it was usually 
to inform us that a vast army of Russians had 
passed through England secretly, and had joined 
our forces at the Front. The same legend met us 
in counties so far apart as Devon and Derby- 
shire, Gloucester and Suffolk. Eye-witnesses had 
seen them, shopkeepers had taken their money; 
there was apparently no railroad in which they 
had not travelled and no dark wood where they 
had not been heard conversing. It was like the 
famous telegram at Quebec: another falsehood 
born of hope and imagination. 

Conceive me then touring England with my 
family during those blazing August days when 
the fortunes of England hung upon the valour 
and endurance of ninety thousand men confronted 
by a host five times as numerous and infinitely 
better armed. I ask myself how I could have 
done it, and the only reply I can find is that my 
action was the natural result of the ideas which 
I had imbibed. I was not more selfish than an- 
other man, I was not unpatriotic, and what I did 
was not due to levity of spirit. It was due in 
part to ignorance of world conditions, in part 
to a habit of mind. Thoughts, emotions, senti- 
ments, the poetry of legend and romance, the 
niceties of literature, the idealisms which are 
rooted in aloofness from real life, and express 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 43 

themselves in a temper of foolish superiority — 
these made the warp and woof of my mental life. 
As for war, as I have already said, it lay quite 
outside my thinking. Granted that wars may be 
necessary, it was the business of states to pay men 
to fight for them, and my business to provide the 
money. Between the civilian and the soldier 
there was no common bond ; they inhabited differ- 
ent stratas. I assumed that the state knew its 
business, and would see to it that I was duly 
protected in my personal pursuit of life, liberty 
and happiness. Therefore when I had dis- 
charged my financial duty to the state I was per- 
fectly justified in going about the pursuit of my 
own private interests. Like that "brooding 
East," cradle of all mysticisms, of which Mat- 
thew Arnold speaks, I was disposed to 

Let the legions thunder past 
And plunge in thought again. 

It was not a noble habit of mind, not even a 
creditable, and I do not defend it. I suspect, 
however, that it is not an uncommon condition of 
mind among men who have Hved tranquil lives 
of cultured self -development, and lived them for 
a long time. Such lives, without being selfish, 
undoubtedlv become self-centred, and that which 



44 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

lies outside their own experience does not exist 
for them. 

But if this was my attitude, there were many 
signs that it was not the attitude of my sons, nor 
was it my attitude for long. As we drew nearer 
London the signs of war became more open. 
We passed camps where Territorial troops were 
being drilled, long lines of houses marked with 
numbers in chalk for the billeting of troops, army 
wagons, guns, horses, and supplies. And the 
news too — it was like a black cloud rolling out 
to meet us. 

It was poisonous with lies, reports called '' offi- 
cial " which proved baseless, but amid the lies 
only too much truth of a disastrous kind. For 
the first time I saw alarm upon the faces of the 
people. And I saw in the eyes of my sons a 
question, which I knew must presently shape it- 
self into words. 

The long grey streets, in a hot blur of August 
dust, opened out before us. We passed a vast 
hospital, at whose windows we could see wounded 
soldiers. The news-boys, shrill-voiced, were call- 
ing above the dull roar of the streets, British De- 
feat, Great Losses. A church-bell rang in a 
cracked monotone. Out of the church door a 
woman dressed in shabby black was coming. At 
the end of the long grey vista rose something that 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 45 

appeared buoyant and strong, a Dome and a 
Cross. It was St. Paul's, shining in the setting 
sun, its dome like the polished breast of a great 
bird, and its Cross a crest of flame. 



IV 

Three pictures live in my memory. 

The first is of men drilling on every open space 
in London, and of troops marching through the 
streets. Kitchener's first proclamation had ap- 
peared calling for half a million men, and with 
it his prophetic statement that the term of the 
war would not be less than three years. I read 
it with amazement. The actual armed forces of 
the Empire, including Territorial troops, already 
numbered a million. Britain had won Waterloo 
with less than eighty thousand troops, half of 
whom were not English-bom. Napoleon's vast- 
est army was less than half a million. What 
kind of war was this, for whose demands a mil- 
lion troops were insufficient? 

Yet Kitchener's statement was received with 
grave assent. There were those who ridiculed 
his ideas about the length of the war, but no one 
questioned the need for immediate recruiting, and 
on a vast scale. The men came forward in thou- 
sands. They waited in long lines from earliest 



46 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

dawn till night at the doors of the recruiting de- 
pots. They were drawn from every class. Men 
of education, familiar with all the amenities of 
good social station, stood shoulder to shoulder 
with carpenters, bricklayers, ostlers, day-labour- 
ers, each alike eager to be chosen for the peril 
of a great game in which his life was the pawn. 
The parks echoed to the sharp commands of mili- 
tary instructions, and the tramp of men learning 
the first elements of drill. I saw these men, with 
mixed feelings of pity and admiration. They 
were in their civilian clothes; they wore straw 
hats and bowler hats, brown boots and white ten- 
nis shoes; many were narrow-shouldered from 
long stooping over desks, and few presented a 
robust appearance; yet their eagerness to learn 
was evident, and their interest in their job en- 
thusiastic. Groups of women, no doubt rela- 
tions, watched them, some with pride, some with 
sad-eyed apprehension. And one afternoon, in 
Shaftesbury Avenue, I saw the first completed 
product of this intensive training. The Artists' 
Corps came swinging down the Avenue, all of 
them men connected with the arts, — painters, 
sculptors, designers, musicians, architects — men 
individually and collectively much above the aver- 
age, and as they marched they sang " Tipperary." 
It was the first time I had heard that lilting air. 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 47 

It has often been criticised for its triviality, and 
some persons, I believe, have compared it un- 
favourably with the stern quality of Teuton army 
songs. But as I heard it for the first time that 
day, it seemed to me to express all the pathos of 
war, all the heroism and self-sacrifice — 

" So good-bye, Piccadilly, 
Farewell Leicester Square. 
It's a long, long way to Tipperary, 
But my heart's right there." 

For the first time I had a sense of the heroism 
and gay courage which war invokes in ordinary 
men. 

The next day I went into a bank in the Strand. 
A very tall man, with a strong aquiline face, was 
standing at the counter talking to the clerk. He 
was dressed in dark clothes, and wore a black tie. 
He finished his business, and walked to the door, 
where he stood in a bemused fashion gazing out 
upon the thronged street. Presently he came 
back to the counter, and said in a low voice to 
the clerk, " Did I tell you he was dead? " 

" Your son ! " exclaimed the clerk. 

"Yes. He's dead. I've just got the news. 
He was killed in action. I thought you would 
like to know\" 

He went again to the door, and stood there, 



48 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

with his sombre, heavy-ringed eyes gazing out 
on the sunht street. 

I had drawn my check, and was coming away. 
He was still standing at the door, as if he could 
not muster up resolution to mix with the busy folk 
of the street, who all seemed so complacent and 
so satisfied. 

As I approached him he stepped forward and 
laid his hand upon my arm. 

" Did I tell you that my son was dead? " he 
said in a dull mechanical voice, as though he were 
repeating a lesson. *' He was killed in action. 
I've just got the news. I thought you would like 
to know." 

I knew then that he was crazed with grief. He 
lifted his hat, and said, '* Forgive me for trou- 
bling you," and turned back to the counter, where 
he stooped down to whisper to the clerk, uttering 
no doubt the same words, which were all his 
stricken mind could frame. 

I left him there. I had received a second im- 
pression of war, and a great terror fell upon me. 
If such a thing should ever happen to me, what 
should I do? 

A week later I saw just the bare fringe of war 
in its collective aspect. We had crossed to Hol- 
land to visit my newly-married daughter who 
was living at The Hague. Gun-boats accom- 



THE FIRST VISION OF WAR 49 

panied the steamer, from which instructions were 
megaphoned as to the position of mines. I re- 
turned from Holland on a boat packed with fu- 
gitives from Belgium. None of them possessed 
much beyond the clothes they wore — a few tiny 
bundles at most. From one of the bundles a 
doll's legs protruded. A dazed child sat beside 
it, fondling the wax feet of the doll. There 
were old men and women who sat perfectly still, 
never moving from one position, as if they had 
lost the power of action. There were young girls 
in whose eyes a secret horror lurked. There were 
white-haired priests, who huddled together 
shocked and silent, rarely lifting their eyes 
through the entire voyage. There was a middle- 
aged man, who looked like a prosperous mer- 
chant, with a bloody rag wound round his fore- 
head. None of these poor people spoke among 
themselves. So vast a distrust of human nature 
had possessed them that they distrusted one an- 
other. Or perhaps speech was dead in them; 
what they had seen and suffered lay beyond 
speech. 

I saw once a dying hare that had been run down 
by dogs and I never forgot the human look of 
appeal and accusation in the wide brown eyes of 
this tiny victim of what men call sport. There 
was the same look in the eyes of these people. 



50 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

The dogs of War had chased them from their 
homes, run them down, torn them with cruel 
fangs; and in their anguished eyes was the un- 
answerable question why these things had hap- 
pened to them, and why the good God had let 
them happen. 

In the gallery of my mind, as I write, these 
three pictures hang side by side : marching men, 
singing " Tipperary " ; a crazed father telling 
strangers that his son is dead; a dismal crowd 
of fugitives, with a dying hare's look of terror 
and accusation in their eyes. 

They compose my first vision of War. They 
epitomise its gay courage, its bitter tragedy, and 
its unspeakable cruelty and injustice. 



DE PROFUNDIS 

So long around our heart we drew 

The Haming line of hope that kept 

Despair at bay, and held it true 

That Christ zvatched while the great world slept. 

And flow our creed breaks like a star. 

And falls in fire, and ends in night; 
The heaven we sought is all too far. 

Our hearts are tired, we have no light. 

We drew the sword, we struck at wrong. 
We fought to mould a better world; 
Now all we held as right so long 
Lies at our feet in ruin hurled. 
We learn the bitter speech of scorn, 

" Their wrong was right, our right was wrong '' 
We tear the Hag in conquest borne. 

And bow our heads beneath the strong. 

Yet not so; if a splendid dream 
We served, we will not perish thus. 
Some Easter-glory yet shall gleam 
Beyond " God has forsaken us! " 
Gird on the sword, the flag raise high! 

Once more against the spears of hell 
We hurl ourselves, and if we die 

We fall as all God's worthiest fell! 



THE GROWING FEAR 



Those who say that fear lies at the root of all 
that is base in human life are undoubtedly right. 
The thief fears poverty, and therefore steals. 
The business man fears defeat, and therefore 
stoops to dishonour. The thinker fears the os- 
tracism which is the punishment of originality, 
and therefore hides his real convictions. We 
all fear pain, loss, and suffering, and therefore 
are willing to do almost anything to evade them. 
Most people fear Death, because they conceive 
it to mean the ultimate disaster. 

I returned from London in 19 14 with Fear for 
my companion. It was a sort of subtle ghost 
which manifested itself capriciously, disappear- 
ing for long intervals, reappearing unexpectedly, 
but, as I knew, never very far away. It leapt 
out at me from the brightest sunlight ; it assailed 
my sleep, and visited me in dreams. 

One dream I remember because it was recur- 
rent. I was travelling over a wide moor in 
S3 



54 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

England, with my son beside me in the automo- 
bile. Grey rocks lay in heaps among the purple 
heather, and the setting sun was poised upon a 
distant hill like a great cauldron, over whose lips 
red lava poured. We were talking eagerly of 
books, scenery and the legendary history of the 
moor, when all at once I discovered that he was 
wearing khaki. The sun sank lower and a change 
passed across the moor. What I had thought 
heaps of rocks were human bodies huddled in 
grotesque attitudes. The red light flowed over 
them, bathing them in blood. My son pointed to 
them, and said something to me which I could 
not understand. The automobile stopped. He 
stepped out of it, regarded me wistfully for a 
moment, then turned his back, strode out upon 
the moor, and walked toward the huddled bodies. 
I called after him, using words of endearment, 
of protest, and finally of anger. He waved his 
hand to me, became a tiny speck against the red 
sun, and disappeared. Darkness fell suddenly 
upon the moor, thick and noiseless as a black 
velvet curtain. A peewit cried in the distance, a 
mountain brook gurgled with a sound like sob- 
bing, a cold wind began to thresh among the 
heather. A horror of great loss fell upon me, 
and I awoke with an extraordinary sense of 
desolation. 



THE GROWING FEAR '55 

This dream was, as all dreams are, a drama- 
tisation of an habitual thought. The spectacle 
of those multitudes of youths drilling on every 
village green of England was not one to be for- 
gotten. It had laid hold of my imagination, and 
I knew that it must have been more affecting to 
my son than to myself. For me it was a spec- 
tacle, but for him it was a challenge. I saw the 
pathos of heroism ; he felt its call. 

He did not tell me this, but our relation had 
been so intimate, our minds had moved to a com- 
mon rhythm through so many years, that I knew 
his thoughts, and he knew that I knew them. 
Our relation had never been the accepted con- 
ventional relation of father and son, which im- 
plies superior experience on one side and con- 
scious immaturity upon the other. I remember 
thinking with some bitterness on the day when 
he left home to go to Oxford University, that in 
all probability his life would now move on a 
plane different from mine. Henceforth he would 
have his own aims and pursuits, and they would 
put a widening gulf between us. It was part 
of the inevitable irony of parentage, which serves 
its turn, launches a new life upon the world, and 
is forgotten. Youth must be served; I must de- 
crease and he would increase. So it had always 
been, so it would always be, and the final act of 



56 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

fatherhood was abdication, which I trusted I 
might be able to achieve at least with grace, at all 
events without protest which is ineffectual, and 
without envy which is absurd. 

To my joy and surprise this sadly anticipated 
hour of abdication never came. My son out- 
shone me in a thousand ways, but one faculty I 
possessed whith held him to me — the faculty of 
youth. I don't know whether sober people of 
conventional habits will count this quality in me 
a virtue or a fault, but I can testify that it has 
•earned for me great dividends of happiness. I 
was not cast for the part of the " heavy father " 
in the drama of life. I could not have played it 
if I had tried. I have always been treated by 
my sons with a kind of genial irreverence which 
sprang from an affectionate acknowledgment that 
I was less their father than their comrade. I 
have shared their pleasures and, upon occasion, 
have been as ready for some gay adventure as 
they. Thus there has always been between us an 
absolute confidence, a complete communion, based 
upon equality of thought and similarity of tem- 
per. 

We have not only shared pleasures, but exile. 
Coming to America with no accurate knowledge 
of the country, flung by chance into a small town 
where there was little or no social life to distract 



THE GROWING FEAR 57 

us, we were all forced very close together by the 
loneliness of our situation. We re-discovered 
one another. We leaned much upon one another, 
both giving and receiving strength. We at- 
tained a new valuation of the simple virtues of 
fidelity, constancy, and family loyalty. In these 
years nothing was done save in common council. 
Any plan I had, any purpose I designed, since it 
affected each member of my family, was fully 
debated with them. The important question of 
finance, which most parents conceal in provoking 
reticence, was considered their business as much 
as mine, for were we not all partners in a com- 
mon venture? My children knew the condition 
of my bank account to its last penny. And, since 
my eldest son, of whom I am writing more par- 
ticularly, lived at home with us through all those 
early years of our American experiment, the 
burden of the household lay heavy on him. 
When I went to hospital for an operation which 
we perfectly knew would end or save my life, 
it was he who went with me, and parted from me 
at the door with a silent hand-grip. When my 
youngest child died, during the absence from 
home of both myself and my wife, it was upon 
him that the chief responsibility of those tragic 
hours was laid. 

There was beside the bond forged by isolation 



58 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

and dependence, the bond of common mutual 
work. All he wrote I read, all I wrote he read. 
There was not a situation in his novels which 
had not been discussed between us. I had 
w^atched the growth of his powers not only with 
parental pride but with the sympathy of a brother 
artist. I knew the rarity of those powers long 
before it was acknowledged by the critics. Our 
literary ideals, not always identic, were compared, 
discussed, dissected in endless conversations, as 
we took our daily walk through the park or sat 
round a fire of logs on winter evenings. In one 
literary undertaking we had been actual partners. 
I mention these things to show that the bond be- 
tween us was of unusual intimacy. I valued it all 
the more when I remembered my own childhood. 
I left home when I was a little over eight years 
old and, with the exception of an interval of two 
years between leaving school and going to college, 
I never lived at home again. I never knew my 
father with the intimacy of a daily contact, con- 
tinued through unhurried years. When the time 
came that I was able to spend long holidays at 
home, my father was an invalid, and the bright- 
ness of his mind was dulled. 

And now The Fear had seized on me that this 
profound intimacy was liable to sudden rupture. 
,We had lived, during our residence in America, 



THE GROWING FEAR 59 

a life very much apart from the world, and we 
had been content to do without the world because 
we were so contented with each other. World 
events had become unimportant; they had re- 
ceded from us as the full tide recedes from a lit- 
tle pool among the rocks. We heard the clamour 
of the sea as something far off, insignificant, di- 
minished and disregarded. The tide was now 
rolling back. The little rock-pool of our still life 
was agitated with the first ripple that predicted 
change. Soon, very soon, the great sea would 
be upon us, and there was no Power, lifting a 
magic rod to say, " Thus far shalt thou come, 
and no further." 

I heard the noise of the approaching water and 
I was afraid. 

II 

Christmas had come again, and once more we 
were together. Some premonition that it might 
be the last Christmas we should spend together 
for a long time haunted each one of us. For 
that reason we had made a great effort to meet. 
My three sons travelled together the three thou- 
sand miles that lay between the ranch and New- 
ark. We were the same group that had found 
life so delightful six months before among the 
hills and woods, but how changed had our 



6o THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

thoughts become! The contrast between those 
days of July splendour and these grey December 
skies was symbolic of the alteration in ourselves. 
Happiness no longer rose in fine excess like a 
sparkling fountain ; it flowed soberly between dull 
banks, and there was the murmur of the ocean in 
the distance. 

There were long talks round the fire as in 
other days, talks full of intimate recollection, but 
I had the sense of unspoken thoughts which we 
dared not utter, and yet felt a strong compulsion 
to reveal. We were very tender with each other 
in those days. Our minds moved warily, seeking 
but shrinking from full contact, as if we were 
aware of a bruise we feared to touch. In the 
long silence I found my sons' eyes fixed on me 
questioningly. And often I looked at them in the 
same V\^ay. What was going on in their minds? 
Two of them had looked on the reality of war in 
England, and Eric, the youngest, was aware that 
several of his old Yale friends were either going, 
or had gone, to serve with the American Ambu- 
lance Corps. For Coningsby I knew that there 
were certain peremptory undertakings in litera- 
ture which could not be set aside in haste. He 
was bound, as a mere matter of honour and con- 
science, to complete them. He had written me 
about them, reporting his progress, and I w^as 



THE GROWING FEAR 6i 

glad to find his progress had been slow. I hoped 
it might be yet slower, for each day that he was 
bound to his task was a day snatched from the 
threatening future. 

I comforted myself with similar reflections 
about the other two boys. How could Reginald 
leave the ranch which represented the invested 
capital and toil of so many years? How could 
Eric break his law indentures, and fail to go on 
with those examinations on which his career de- 
pended? In each case I found not only the obli- 
gation of self-interest, but the still more exigent 
obligations of the pledged word. I found my- 
self arguing their case for them, but from my 
point of view rather than theirs. And I knew 
that they would look to me for counsel. What 
counsel could I give? When I argued their case 
before the bar of my own intelligence I had no 
difficulty in winning a verdict. But if I argued 
the case before the court of their own honour, 
could I win it? As a last resort, I thought that 
I could use one argument which they would re- 
spect. If I admitted the claim of inevitable duty, 
I could not admit it for all three. The most that 
I could grant was that one must go. But no 
sooner had I made this admission than my mind 
recoiled from another question, which f They 
were equally dear. The career of each had been 



62 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

costly. I had lived in the success of each, and in 
their anticipated future. And even if I could 
persuade them that only one must go, which 
would be ready to retire in favour of the other 
two? 

The newspapers came each morning with their 
stories of heroic struggle and their toll of death. 
We read them furtively. I would enter the room 
suddenly and find one of my sons absorbed in the 
war news; the paper was instantly thrust aside, 
with a pathetic assumption of indifference. I 
myself read the war news secretly. I found 
paragraphs that so stirred the heart that I was 
deeply moved; but not the less I hoped that my 
sons might not have noticed them. In ordinary 
circumstances we should have discussed them 
fully. We should have read aloud the war- 
poems that filled the papers, many of them so ex- 
cellent in quality and so pathetic in substance that 
we should have been delighted with their merit. 
Now I dared not do this, and I knew why. I 
feared the touch that might precipitate the ava- 
lanche. And my sons, equally conscious of the 
poised peril, feared it too, for my sake. 

We all tried to make believe that this was an 
ordinary Christmas, like any other. We visited 
theatres, dined at restaurants, tried to keep alive 
the old spirit of gaiety and light-hear tedness ; 



THE GROWING FEAR 63 

but there was no spontaneity in our mirth. Fear 
sat beside us in the theatre, and whispered at our 
shoulders in the restaurants. The jests of the 
theatre fell flat, the gaiety of the well-dressed 
crowds in the restaurants was an offence. I re- 
member one performance on behalf of some form 
of war relief, at which a celebrated actor made an 
eloquent appeal for help. We sat silent and un- 
thrilled. It seemed such a poor thing to be send- 
ing dollars when other nations were sending 
lives. We saw behind the brilliant scenery of 
the stage those pale youths drilling in the London 
parks, and marching with Tipperary on their lips 
to their ultimate fate. From such excursions we 
came home silent and depressed. Money I was 
willing enough to give, but could that cancel my 
debt? Could America hope in the long run to 
pay her debt to liberty with dollars ? How could 
she, and how could I buy myself out of the stern 
conscription of inevitable duty by such means? 
And, as we came back in the train at midnight, 
the very wheels seemed to chant in dreadful 
rhythm, *' Lives, not dollars." 

One night the tension broke, quite suddenly. 

The hour was late, and we sat round the em- 
bers of a dying fire. Coningsby had been writ- 
ing all day, and I asked him how his book was 
going. 



64 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

" I can see the end," he said quietly. " When 
I have finished it of course I shall enlist." 

A sharp pain shot through my heart, and was 
followed by a hot wave of indignation. 

'' No, no, you must not think of that," I cried. 

His mother and his sister, braver than I, said, 
" He knows best what he ought to do." 

*' My dear father," he said, " you know what 
I ought to do, don't you? I'm not acting in 
haste. I've thought it all over. I know how 
serious a step it is. I wouldn't take it, if I wasn't 
forced to. I must, I simply must enlist." 

" And I," said Reginald. " All the men are 
going in Kootenay. I can't lift up my head if I 
don't." 

" And I," said Eric. " I don't mind going as 
an ambulance driver, if you strongly wish it, but 
I would rather enlist with the others." 

" But think of your careers," I pleaded. 
" You've each worked so long and so hard, and 
now, just when you're going to reap your re- 
w^ards — " 

*' Think of our careers, if we don't go," they 
answered. 

" Just because youVe been so proud of us, we 
want you to go on being proud of us," said Con- 
ingsby. *' And you couldn't be proud of us if 
we were slackers, could you? " 



THE GROWING FEAR 65 

I had no answer. I was too stunned for argu- 
ment. 

" Both Con and I wanted to join when we were 
in England," said Reginald. " But do you re- 
member what you said? You said it would 
break your heart, and so we didn't join." 

" I think it will break your heart if we don't 
join now," said Coningsby. " It won't get 
broken all at once ; but in years to come you'll be 
ashamed of us, and that's what will break your 
heart. My dear father, do try to see it all from 
our point of view. I know that you do really 
think as we think, but pain won't let you be quite 
honest with yourself. When the pain is past 
you'll not only agree with us, but you'll be proud 
of us." 

"I'm afraid not," I said brokenly. "At all 
events I can't think like that now." 

" You will some day. I am sure of it. We've 
not been so close together all these years without 
my discovering that you can rise to hard occa- 
sions as well as any other man, indeed much more 
readily than most men." 

But in that hour all the resilience of my soul 
seemed broken. The occasion crushed me and 
drew forth no answering courage. All I knew 
was that the Fear that had so long haunted me 
had dropped the veil, and now gazed into my 



66 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

shrinking eyes with its own cold eyes of calcu- 
lated malice. Those eyes were awful as the eyes 
of Death, and I was afraid. 



in 

My fear tried to justify itself on philosophic 
grounds. 

One night we put upon the victrola an exqui- 
site violin solo of Kreisler's. The paper had 
informed me that morning that Kreisler had 
joined the Austrian army, and was going to the 
Front. Instantly my mind conceived a picture 
of Kreisler with a shattered right hand, trodden 
down in the indiscriminate rage of battle. He 
would return, if he returned at all, a maimed man, 
and who could estimate what his loss would mean 
to the music of the world? The papers had dis- 
cussed that very point, and some one had written 
a poignant letter, pleading that artists and musi- 
cians should be considered sacrosanct in time of 
war. 

My mind went back once more to that Artist's 
Corps which I had seen, singing Tipperary with 
such light hearts as they marched down Shaftes- 
bury Avenue. I knew that many of them must 
be men of achievement and some of original and 
conspicuous genius. They carried the art of the 



THE GROWING FEAR 67 

future with them. An ordinary man might fall 
in battle, and the world be no poorer ; but when a 
man of genius dies untimely, the world is robbed 
of a great inheritance. 

I told myself that even in a time of war some 
respect was due to the canons of economy. A 
nation might squander its treasure and replace 
it, but it could not replace squandered genius. 
The world could better spare a regiment of Aus- 
trian peasants than one Kreisler. War was bru- 
tally indifferent to spiritual and intellectual val- 
ues. In the commonalty of a soldier's life the 
poet was of no more value than the hodman. 
What stupid tragic vandalism was this, that men 
of the highest gifts, of immense value to the 
world, should be sacrificed upon a job that could 
be as well or better done by men whose sole effi- 
ciency was physical! 

I looked upon Coningsby, and remembered 
how many years had gone to his making, to the 
discovery and development of his peculiar gifts. 
There were the days of childhood — even then he 
had begun to write. There were the years of 
school; how well I remembered leaving him one 
bitter winter day at the iron gates of a puritan 
academy, and noticing how red his hands were 
with the cold, and how forlorn he looked. There 
were many months, during which he rode his 



68 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

bicycle sixty miles a week to the house of the 
scholar who tutored him for Oxford. There 
were the years at Oxford, and then the hidden 
years during which he wrought in doubt and dif- 
ficulty to learn the art of writing with distinction 
and lucidity. How many years in all? A fifth 
of a lifetime in all probability. Would it not be 
the most monstrous kind of waste if all the fine 
efficiency gained through those laborious years 
were sacrificed? Certainly common sense de- 
manded some discrimination between the man 
who had been trained for a difficult and rare task, 
and the man whose sole possession was his physi- 
cal efficiency. 

And then there was that other thought, already 
made so obvious : he was my eldest son, and if he 
enlisted it was certain that the two younger broth- 
ers would enlist. They would follow his lead, 
and would not be outdone in sacrifice. The en- 
croaching wave would not be satisfied with one 
victim. The stern spirit of War, like the half- 
inspired fanatic of Ibsen's poem, would demand 
All or Nothing. 

Again and again I rehearsed these thoughts. 
I knew that they were rational. I knew that I 
had a case which any reasonable jury would re- 
spect. The writer who had pleaded for the 
exemption of musicians and artists had stated 



THE GROWING FEAR 69 

that case for me on the large grounds of human 
welfare, seen not in a passing phase, but in its 
enduring claims. 

And yet the moment I endorsed it I became 
aware of its weakness. If the poet, the artist, 
the musician were exempt, why not the chemist, 
the engineer, the man of science? Where could 
we stop? Who, among the professional classes 
at least, could not give ample proof that he was 
of more real value to the community in the pur- 
suit of his calling than in using his bodily strength 
upon a battlefield? Besides, there was the fact 
that Kreisler had gone. He knew the rarity of 
his gift better than any one, yet he had gone. He 
could estimate its value with the finest judgment, 
yet some powerful impulse had led him to count 
his gift as of small account weighed in the bal- 
ance with a duty that was heroic and imperative. 

There was also another plea which insisted on 
a hearing. In this plea for the exemption of men 
of intellect was there not something inherently 
snobbish ? What it really came to was that com- 
mon men should perform all the heroism of the 
world, and uncommon men should profit by it. 
The labourer and the artisan should die that a 
Kreisler should enjoy security for the develop- 
ment of his art. And after all was that art more 
truly necessary to the world than the toil which 



70 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

raised harvests, built roads, launched ships, and 
riveted the bridge over which the commerce of 
a continent was carried? And, if it came to a 
measurement of individual loss, was not the loss 
of a breadwinner from a humble home as truly 
tragic as the loss of a violinist from a concert- 
hall, even though he played a fiddle as no other 
man could play it? 

So I argued with a mind divided. No sooner 
had one reason triumphed than another contra- 
dicted it. My thoughts ran to and fro, like wa- 
ters washing round a shallow bowl, without out- 
let, without definite aim. And all the time, rea- 
son it as I would, my Fear drew nearer. I could 
not exorcise it, nor dared I say with Hamlet to his 
father's ghost, 

" I'll cross it though it blast me." 

I could only wait in silence the approaching step, 
as one in a dark wood, who hears the dry twigs 
crackle under the stealthy movement of some 
dreaded foe. 

IV 

One day we received a letter informing us that 
a man whom we all knew well had been killed in 
action. He was young, bright, alert, with a wife 



THE GROWING FEAR 71 

and two-year-old son. He had gone out with 
the first contingent of the Canadian forces, and 
had been less than three months in Flanders when 
he was killed. A silence fell upon us as we read 
the letter. After breakfast we went away to our 
various duties, but all day long the spectre raised 
by that letter haunted us. 

War in the abstract may be philosophised upon, 
but this was war in the concrete, and it struck 
home to the heart. It was as though the com- 
monplace, " We all must die," had been replaced 
by the poignant message, " You must die, and 
soon." No one is concerned by the general threat 
of death which hangs above the entire human 
race, but we are instantly and profoundly affected 
by the death of a person we have loved. In the 
same way the casualty lists of a battle leave us 
cold, or inspire only a pity too diffused to be in- 
tense, but the death of a single friend in battle 
shocks us with a sense of outrage. It was so we 
felt when this news reached us, and the very mode 
in which it was conveyed was significant. It was 
contained in a postscript, as if the writer of the 
letter attached slight importance to it. To him 
it must have appeared a normal occurrence, and 
I found myself reflecting on the blunted sensibil- 
ity which war produces in the spectator. But to 
me it was abnormal to the point or horror. What 



^2 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

the writer of the letter had put into a callous 
postscript, I saw blazoned on the heavens in a 
scroll of blood and fire. 

During all that day I thought over the history 
of the dead man. His heroism I could not deny, 
but very soon I found myself searching for rea- 
sons which might lessen its force as an example. 
I told myself that he was an adventurer, to whom 
peril of any kind was an attraction. He had 
spent his life in taking risks. He belonged to that 
large class of wandering Englishmen who are 
brave, high-spirited, enamoured of danger, but 
who follow no definite plan in life, and are in- 
capable of looking very far ahead. He had not 
even looked far enough ahead to imagine what 
might happen to his young wife and child if he 
should die. He was symbolic of that splendid 
thoughtlessness of youth, which sets little value 
upon life; which also, it must be confessed, wins 
and builds up empires. And I added, with a 
qualm of shame at the meanness of the thought, 
that after all in his death no special loss of rare 
gifts was involved, which would make the future 
of the race definitely poorer. 

These reflections were, of course, the product 
of my own condition of mind. I wanted, above 
all things, to find convincing reasons why my 
sons should not enlist, reasons which would have 



THE GROWING FEAR 73 

weight with them. And I knew that this story of 
our friend's death would affect them in a way that 
I did not desire. What would appeal to them 
most in the story would be the chivalry of the dead 
man, and they certainly would not be deterred by 
its tragedy. To me also the chivalry appealed, 
but my Fear was too potent for me to appreciate 
it at its true worth. Here was the work of Fear 
again; it sought to diminish the motives of an 
heroic act, in order that I might gain a personal 
end very dear to me. And yet I had always been 
very sensitive to the splendour of heroism ! I had 
read Plutarch's Lives with a thrilled heart. I 
had written and lectured on great patriotic his- 
tories. One of my first and most memorable 
journeys as a boy was to Portsmouth, that I might 
stand in the cockpit of the Victory where Nelson 
died. I had made a point when travelling in Eng- 
land to visit battlefields, the graves of heroes, and 
ancient castles before whose immemorial walls 
great deeds were done. I had often stood in 
London at the base of Nelson's monument, and 
had seemed to hear from those lips of bronze the 
sacred invocation, " England expects this day 
that every man will do his duty." In America I 
had visited the battlefields of the Civil War with 
the same feelings. I was familiar with the hero- 
isms of Gettysburg, and had walked among the 



74 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

nameless graves of Chickamauga. All this was 
true, and yet, when a true hero appeared before 
me, I turned my head away. I was unwilling to 
recognise him because to praise him might invite 
disaster for myself. To such a mean attitude of 
mind had Fear conducted me. 

I think it was this consciousness of the growth 
of mean thoughts within me that first made me 
aware of how Fear was debasing me. I found 
no extenuation in the plea, which was true, that 
my fear was after all not for myself but for 
others. Affection, not less than hatred, can play 
the Judas part of betrayal. When Christ said 
that a man's foes might be those of his own 
household, was he not thinking of affection as a 
foe to heroism? Might he not have been think- 
ing of just such a case as mine, for was not I al- 
lowing my affection for my sons to become the 
foe of their honour? And after all, was I think- 
ing only of my sons ? Was it really true that my 
fear was altogether for another, not myself? 
No : I saw now that it was in large part the fear 
of losing my own happiness. I foresaw the an- 
guish of separation, the loneliness, the empty 
days, the anxious nights, the total disruption of 
those schemes of life on which my personal happi- 
ness was based. *' If I lost them" — ay, there 
was the rub — I was measuring my own loss and 



THE GROWING FEAR 75 

was afraid to contemplate it. Love for them 
and love for myself were interwoven so closely 
that I could not disintegrate them, but I knew 
that the one was as authentic as the other. I was 
afraid because I loved; but not the less I was 
afraid of the loss that love might suffer. 

By virtue of that magic which interprets the 
silence of thought between those whose minds are 
exquisitely intimate, I knew that my sons com- 
prehended the anguish I endured. I found on 
Coningsby's table one night Tennyson's poems, 
opened at the noble poem called Love and Duty, 
and there was a broad pencil mark beneath the 
lines : 

If this indeed were all 
Better the narrow brain, the stony heart, 
The staring eyes glazed o'er with sightless days. 
The long mechanic pacings to and fro, 
The set grey life, and apathetic end. 

I think he meant me to read the passage, and I 
knew the message he meant it to convey. Robbed 
of the heroisms of duty what was life worth? If 
duty were deflected from its sacred task by love 
what result could be expected ? " The set grey 
life, the apathetic end," — that was the penalty 
of a life that sat in fear, the reward of heroism 
silenced and renounced. 

A memory came to me of a family I had known 



76 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

in London, whose modes of life we had often 
spoken of with humorous scorn. There were 
three sons and a daughter, each of whom had 
been mollycoddled from the birth. The boys 
were educated privately because the parents had 
concluded that public schools were deeply injuri- 
ous to youthful morals. They were allowed to 
take no part in manly sports, because all sports 
were dangerous. They were forbidden to take 
a hoHday in Switzerland, because sometimes men 
lost their lives there on treacherous glaciers. I 
think the night air of London was also considered 
dangerous to their lungs for they were never al- 
lowed out of doors after nine o'clock. The girl 
was high-spirited, broke away from the parental 
prison-house and joined the militant suffragettes. 
The boys grew up as might have been expected, 
shy, timid, ineffective, fearing wet feet more than 
a soldier fears wounds and death, concerned over 
a winter influenza more than a football player is 
over a broken leg in a victorious game. Here 
was the work of Fear again, the total emascula- 
tion of manhood, youth robbed of its joy, and 
covered with absurdity. Did I wish my sons to 
become even as these? The idea was ridiculous, 
and yet if I allowed my fear for them to inter- 
fere with the natural energy of their desires, and 
if their affection for me induced them to submit 



THE GROWING FEAR jj 

to my wishes, was I not guilty of the emascula- 
tion of their manhood which must ensue ? 

Fear — I saw now that it was the real root of 
all evil. It attacks the roots of action, as a canker 
worm eats its way through the hidden fibres of 
the flower, until the leaf withers and the petal 
falls in ruin. It was already breeding base 
thoughts in me, and would breed baser. It was 
making me insensitive to all those higher visions 
of life and duty which had once delighted me. I 
noticed that I could no longer read Plutarch's 
Lives with pleasure. I was reluctant to read 
patriotic poetry or histories ; and if I did, found 
myself out of sympathy with them. I could not 
even read the newspapers, with their daily epic 
of great deeds upon the battlefield, without a cer- 
tain impatience. Fear was poisoning me. The 
slow virus was infecting every thought. Then I 
said, I must kill Fear, or Fear will kill me. 

Through all this struggle one thing grew upon 
me with increasing clearness — my sons were not 
afraid. I knew what they would do as surely as 
though I had seen them girding on the armour 
of a knight, and dedicating their swords in silent 
midnight vigil before some altar, over which hung 
the tortured body of the Crucified. If I was to 
remain their comrade, must not I kneel there with 
them? Could I retain that sensitive and all but 



78 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

perfect community of mind which had so long 
united us, if I failed them now? And at that 
question my Fear suddenly took a new and blessed 
shape, as though a dark cloud had been penetrated 
by the rosy fires of dawn — I feared lest I should 
prove unworthy of them. When I had feared be- 
cause my happiness was threatened, I had feared 
ignobly : but this was noble fear. The fear lest 
I might prove unworthy carried with it the reso- 
lution to be worthy, whatever it must cost me. 

I have been at pains to trace these movements 
of my mind because I know that there are multi- 
tudes around me who are passing through the 
same experience. The strange horror of war has 
found them unprepared, and in adjusting them- 
selves to it, the very heart is wrenched apart. 
One great lesson I have learned from my experi- 
ence, — not to despise the man who is afraid. If 
the truth be told we are all afraid when we hear 
the footsteps of tragedy approaching us. We 
are all disposed at first to buy off the invading 
foe with any kind of bribe. In the conquest of 
fear lies our only chance of escape from the baser 
elements of our nature which always threaten to 
destroy us. Our sin is not in being afraid, but 
in yielding to our fear; and the highest courage 
is in being afraid, but still going on and acting 
as though we are not afraid. 



WHEN HEROES DIE 

When Heroes die no tears shall fall; 

For them the morning stars shall sing. 
And golden planets bear their pall 
With hosts of heaven following. 
And close-ranked angels, wing on wing, 
When Heroes die. 

When Heroes die it is not meet 

To make them mournful obsequies. 
With candles at the head and feet, 
And cere-cloths drawn round their eyes; 
A Brightness fills the earth and skies 
When Heroes die. 

When Heroes die tall trumpeters 

Before heaven's gate proclaim their worth. 
In marble tombs the great dust stirs 
Of soldiers who subdued the earth. 
And God Himself makes solemn mirth 
When Heroes die. 

Wherefore for us, when Heroes die, 

Shall be no mournful grave-ward glance: 
Our souls, zvith theirs, invade the sky 
And to immortal strifes advance; 
For great is our inheritance 
When Heroes die. 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 
I 

I was in England again. 

The great decision had been made, and my son 
was a soldier. His two brothers had joined the 
British Navy. In a single month they had all 
gone from us. His brothers were waiting their 
appointments, and he was returning for a brief 
leave after four months' service at the Front. 
We were to meet all three sons in London, as I 
have narrated elsewhere. 

One vision of War I had had, and it had cre- 
ated in me apprehension and resentment. That 
mood had by no means passed away, although it 
was greatly modified. I had submitted to the in- 
evitable, but I was not reconciled to it. I had 
submitted because I realised that the honour of 
my sons was involved, and that they would feel 
their honour stained and themselves eternally 
disgraced if they had not gone. But to accept 
the Cross reluctantly is one thing; to accept it 
because its meaning is profoundly apprehended 
is quite another. 

8i 



82 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

If I had remained in America I do not think I 
should have been able to attain this pro founder 
apprehension of the war. I am speaking now, 
of course, of the days before America had real- 
ised her true relation to the great world struggle. 
A large and influential body of people still 
preached peace, and were apparently prepared to 
advocate or retain peace at any price. The Eu- 
ropean struggle was commonly regarded as lying 
outside the immediate interests of America. 
America was not directly threatened, or believed 
she was not. Judging by the press, and by the 
war books that began to flood the market, it was 
evident that the horror of the war was much more 
vitally perceived than the ideals for which the 
Allies fought. The suspicion still lingered that 
the war was like all other European wars, more 
or less a conflict of dynasties, of national ambi- 
tions, of commercial rivalries. In a word, the 
spiritual aspects of the struggle were not realised; 
they were not thoroughly realised even by myself; 
and I owe it to that visit to England that at last 
my attitude of reluctant acquiescence in an in- 
evitable Cross was changed to a real perception 
of its meaning, and of reconciliation to it. 

The England of 19 14 I have already described, 
an England half-awake, ignorantly confident, im- 
perturbably cheerful, treating the war as an inci- 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 83 

dent and deriding its menace with the motto — 
" Business as usual." How different was the 
England I now saw, so different that it appeared 
almost unrecognisable! Since that memorable 
August of 1914 blow after blow had fallen. The 
splendid army which grappled with overwhelming 
forces at Mons was no more; of the officers and 
men who had formed that heroic Expeditionary 
Force, not a tithe was left. The human wreck- 
age of the iron storm that swept the fields of 
Flanders had drifted back on every tide, and the 
streets were full of wounded men. The threat 
of invasion, which had not been heard since Na- 
poleon had assembled an army at Boulogne more 
than a hundred years before, had once more be- 
come credible. The entire eastern coast was 
scarred with trenches, and on the inland rail- 
way stations there were posted elaborate in- 
structions of what must be done in case of the 
landing of the enemy. Portions of the Univer- 
sities of Oxford and Cambridge were hospitals. 
The parks of the nobility were camps, and great 
historic houses, which had known for centuries 
nothing but the stately and sustained splendour 
of lordly lives, were convalescent homes. Blow 
after blow had fallen indeed, but it would seem 
that each blow had but beaten the nation into 
a firmer consistency of courage and resistance, 



S.; THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

as steel is tempered in the fire. It was an amaz- 
inrj England, an incredible England, and I could 
not but recall the great words of Milton, — 
'" Methinks I see in my mind a noble and a puis- 
sant nation, rousing herself like a strong man 
after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; me- 
tl:inks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty 
youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full 
mid-day beam, purging and unsealing her long- 
abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly ra- 
diance." 

Through a land swept clean of youth we trav- 
elled from Liverpool to London. The porters 
at the stations were boys or old men, and the con- 
ductors of the train were past middle-age. When 
I commented upon this fact, it was explained to 
me that from this railway alone sixteen thousand 
men had joined the arniy. The windows of the 
carriages were darkened, the lights veiled, so that 
\\Q travelled as in one long tunnel for two hun- 
dred miles. London was dark, too. The great 
railway station was like a dim cave, in which spec- 
tral figures moved. The lamps in the streets 
were so shaded by a heavy coat of paint that they 
cast only a little pool of light upon the black road. 
In one direction only was there light — far across 
the sky, flung up like flaming fingers which groped 
amid the murk, the great search-lights played, 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 85 

feeling for the silver body of some hidden Zep- 
pelin. Under this canopy of weaving flames, be- 
tween these dark bulks of houses, mad taxi-driv- 
ers drove at full speed, as if in purposed defiance 
of conditions which made a London street more 
perilous than the shelving road of a Colorado 
canyon. 

London conveyed an extraordinary sense of 
Empire. I had seen tvv^o Jubilees in London, and 
the burial of the Queen, whose long reign had 
thus been celebrated : each was a great occasion 
for the home-gathering of the far-flung British 
race. But in the main these were spectacular as- 
semblages of the picked figures of the race. I 
saw how a nobler pageant — not a splendid group 
of princes, soldiers and statesmen, surrounded by 
troops in all the bravery of dazzling uniforms, 
riding down Whitehall to the solemn portals of 
the Abbey, but, as it were, the race itself assem- 
bled. The Australian, the Canadian, the New 
Zealander, men from Labrador and Llonduras, 
from Hudson's Bay and India, jostled one an- 
other in Piccadilly and the Strand. Every thea- 
tre and restaurant v/as full of men in uniform. 
Strange stories were told of friends and broth- 
ers, who had not met for years, suddenly coming 
face to face upon the London streets. The pop- 
ulation of London was said to have increased by 



86 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

half a million. It had become, not in theory, but 
in visible reality, the focus of an Empire. 

The wounded and the maimed were every- 
where. At the theatres I saw boxes filled with 
blinded soldiers, in the restaurants one-legged 
men cutting up the food for one-armed men. 
Every public institution conspicuously displayed 
its Roll of Honour, the long list of those who had 
passed through its doors to die in battle. On 
one such roll I counted three hundred names ; on 
another the list was too long for counting. From 
one suburban Church one hundred and seventy 
men had gone, from another eight hundred. 
There were no young men in the shops. Aged, 
half-decrepit shop walkers, long ago retired, had 
returned to their posts, and did the best they could 
to fulfil duties beyond their strength. A new 
motto was on every lip, not the foolish phrase 
" Business as usual," but that every one should 
" do his bit.'^ Every man was obviously doing 
it, and every woman too, for women in semi- 
uniform were everywhere acting as porters, 
chauffeurs, and bus-conductors. Great munition 
works had arisen everywhere. They were said to 
number four thousand, and they employed more 
than a million workers, seven hundred thousand 
of whom were women. At Gretna Green, a soli- 
tary hamlet on the Scotch border, where two years 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR ^7 

earlier scarcely a dozen houses could be counted, 
a city of twenty thousand persons had sprung up, 
and the solitary moor was lit far and wide with 
the red flame of furnaces, and starred with elec- 
tric lights. The multitude of women thus em- 
ployed had proved themselves brave, capable and 
trustworthy. Their tasks were hard, but they 
did them with painstaking thoroughness, making 
no complaint even when noxious gases discoloured 
their complexions and were a threat to health as 
well as beauty. During the time I was in London 
there was a terrible explosion in one of these mu- 
nition factories, resulting in the death of scores 
of women, and the maiming of far more. I 
heard the opinion expressed that so dire an acci- 
dent would frighten the women workers, and that 
it was probable many would not return to work 
the next day. Nothing of the kind occurred. 
It was proudly reported that on the day after the 
calamity not a single woman in the London area 
was absent from her post. They were doing 
their bit, and they were not to be outdone by sol- 
diers in the trenches in taking the chance of death 
with a gay deliberate courage. 

Even more remarkable in the light of past 
history was the fact that the people had surren- 
dered all their rights and liberties into the hands 
of the Government. No people has ever fought 



88 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

harder for their liberties; nowhere on earth has 
individualism claimed so wide a latitude. I shall 
hardly be contradicted if I say that the English 
are the most contentious people in the world where 
personal rights are involved, the readiest to re- 
sist authority, the quickest to resent improper in- 
terference, always bristling with pugnacity at 
the least threat of tyranny, and making it one of 
their chief pursuits and pleasures to oppose what- 
ever government happens to exist, whether good 
or bad. Yet all these individual liberties, so 
hardly fought for, were surrendered without a 
protest. Hotels were commandeered for public 
uses ; regulations were put on light and food ; the 
railwa3^s were run by the Government ; the '' pub- 
lic houses " or saloons, were submitted to a strict 
discipline, which before the war, had it been at- 
tempted in a much less drastic form, would have 
resulted in violent mob-meetings, street-fighting, 
and possibly insurrection. 

An amazing England indeed, an England re- 
fashioned and reborn into a likeness of which past 
history gave no indication, held no barest hint of 
prophecy. An England no longer divided by 
party, turbulent in counsel, complacently individ- 
ualistic in spirit, but welded into unity, coherent, 
determined, moving with the perfect rhythm of 
common action toward a common end. By what 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 89 

miracle had the change been wrought? It was 
the fruit of a new ideahsm working Hke a potter's 
hand upon the plastic soul of the nation, the soul 
whose hard crust of materialism and selfishness 
was broken, whose inner substance had been sof- 
tened and made plastic by the process of a great 
suffering. 

Out of that suffering there had arisen a new 
ideal of the State. It was no longer the paid 
soldier's business to defend it, but the solemn pri- 
mal duty of every man who had a home he loved, 
or a hand that could grasp a musket, to defend it 
It was a new ideal of personal life. What the 
true prophets of the race had preached so long 
to heedless ears was now seen to be true, the chief 
end of life was not to get, but to give. 

■Renounce joy for my fellow's sake? 
That's joy beyond joy. 

The values of life were all altered. Wealth had 
suddenly become valueless, and the sordid quest 
of wealth a sacrilege. Personal happiness had 
been supplanted by an ideal of collective good. 
Death was not the ultimate disaster, for there were 
things more to be feared than death. To suffer 
for a cause was no longer the sole prerogative of 
martyrs, it was the common privilege. And these 
ideals working themselves out in practical results, 



90 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

had produced something so astonishing that it was 
all but incredible. What the boasted supermen 
of Germany had accomplished by forty years of 
intense effort, backed by every weapon that au- 
tocracy could wield, England had achieved in two 
years. She had built a war machine superior to 
Germany's ; she, who had so long loved peace and 
striven for it, had put five million men in the field, 
and each man was there because he had so willed 
it. She had appealed not to the lust of world- 
dominion, but to that deep love of liberty and 
justice which was inherent in the English heart, 
and at her voice the England of Cromwell had 
risen from the grave, but a much greater Eng- 
land than Cromwell knew, inspired by a wider 
vision and dedicated to a harder task. 



II 

This new spirit which was in the English peo- 
ple manifested itself in many ways. The general 
public spectacle of collective energy directed to 
a common task was impressive, but this was not 
all. Individuals were changed. Persons whom 
I had known well during my long residence in 
London were changed. They spoke with a new 
accent, acted in a new way. 

I can best explain that change by an illustra- 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 91 

tion. When I left London for America in 1904 
there was a rehgious revival at work in Wales 
which was unlike any other movement of the 
kind, both in its method and its quality. It was 
not organised, it had no outstanding preacher, it 
was scarcely directed; it was in the strict sense 
of the word a movement, a mysterious stirring 
of the depths, a spreading wave, a swelling and 
rush of spiritual tides that swept through the en- 
tire Principality. I remember an agnostic jour- 
nalist telling me that no sooner did he reach 
Wales than there fell on him a curious awe. He 
had intended to write a cynical article for his 
newspaper — all his articles were cynical — but 
he was overwhelmed by the sense of a spiritual 
power which he could not comprehend. He came 
back to London with his article unwritten. *' I 
feel," he said, " as though I had seen God." 

The England of 19 16- 17 produced in me a 
similar sensation. I do not mean that there was 
any sign of a revival of religion. The change 
had nothing to do with organised religion. The 
churches were by no means crowded, and public 
worship was, from all I could observe and hear, 
less popular than in times of peace. But the 
change was there, and its signs were a strange 
composure, a detachment from self, an elevation 
of thought and temper, perceptible in all classes 



92 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

of society. One could only describe it as the 
soul of a nation liberated from long bondage and 
expressing itself in new terms. And there were 
moments when the sense of miracle, of spiritual 
forces visibly at work, was so overwhelming that 
the same curious awe fell on me which my cynical 
London journalist had felt, and like him I said, 
" I feel as though I am seeing God." 

It may be thought that I exaggerate. It may 
be said, " But America has been at war for some 
months, and no such phenomenon as this has been 
discernible." But the cases are not equal. I 
thankfully admit that a great change has passed 
over American life since that memorable Good 
Friday of 1917 when America declared war. 
Millions of men and women have altered the en- 
tire method of their lives, replacing selfish per- 
sonal aims with devoted, public service. The 
flower of American youth has dedicated itself to 
the war and many an American girl, bred to an 
empty round of social pleasure, has crossed the 
seas to toil among the maimed and dying in the 
hospitals of France. Nevertheless, the cases are 
not equal. The war has not yet touched the 
deep springs of American life. The tide of blood 
has scarcely washed her shores. The grim agony 
of the conflict, with its daily toll of death, its 
frightful casualty lists, its demand on faith and 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 93 

fortitude, has not yet gripped the heart of the 
American people. Two years of war had done 
these things for England. Men and women had 
been violently thrown back on primal conceptions 
of faith and duty, and had been forced to refash- 
ion their creeds in conformity with their circum- 
stances. They had looked into the eyes of death, 
and had seen there that which made the common 
uses of life worthless. That was the secret of 
their spiritual transformation. Before the war 
is done the same transformation will come to 
America. It is already at work, and lies at the 
root of things. When it is accomplished, as it 
surely will be, I shall not be accused of exagger- 
ation when I say that a solemn awe fell on me as 
I looked on that England of proud sorrow and 
exalted heroism which met me in the last days of 
1916. 

Here is one feature of the scene, small in itself 
but deeply significant. I have spoken of the 
multitudes of maimed soldiers in the streets, the 
theatres, the restaurants, and they were indica- 
tions of how wide had been the swath cut by the 
scythes of death among the people. " Every one 
has lost some one," people said. Yet, as I 
watched the London streets, no one wore black. 
In the old days, especially among the poorer 
classes, no imagined insult to the dead could be 



94 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

more heartless than not to wear black for them. 
Decency demanded the trappings of bereavement, 
and a grief that wore not the apparel of grief was 
not a real grief. Yet it was possible to walk 
among the throngs of London for a long day, 
and meet not a solitary sign of crape. When I 
remarked upon it, the quick reply was, *' Oh, it 
isn't done. If we wore mourning it would pro- 
duce a sombre effect, and would make it harder 
for people who have lost their men to be brave. 
So we don't wear black." 

I went to a theatre one night to hear Harry 
Lauder. His son, on whom all his hopes were 
set, had been killed in action a week or two 
earlier. He was absent from the stage for two 
nights; on the third he resumed his part, saying 
that he believed his son would have wished him 
to go on doing his bit. The part that he had to 
perform was the crudest test of courage that 
could be imagined. The scene was set at the 
Horse Guards; a company of men in khaki 
marched past to the gay lilt of martial music; 
Lauder sang a song about the boys coming home. 
Conceive the situation : his own son lay dead, and 
he had to sing of the boys coming home! It 
seemed as if the management should have cut this 
song; every canon of decency demanded it. But 
the song was the best thing in the performance; 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 95 

to have omitted it would have deprived the pub- 
lic of a pleasure, and Lauder himself would not 
have agreed to its deletion, for it would not have 
been " doing his bit." He sang it with every 
nerve drawn tense. His stern set face, deeply 
lined; his trembling lips and stiff attitude, wit- 
nessed to the strain he suffered. But he sang 
it to the end without faltering, and left the stage 
amid the sympathetic silence of his audience. 
That silence was their tribute to one of the rarest 
acts of courage that the stage had ever witnessed. 
I dined with an old friend one night, whose 
children had been brought up with my own. 
When the war broke out his eldest daughter was 
newly married to a brilliant University professor. 
He enlisted at once, with the entire consent of his 
young wife. He went to France with the first 
British forces, fought through eight terrible 
months unscathed, and came home on leave to see 
his new-born son. He returned, and within a 
few weeks news came that he was severely in- 
jured. His wife instantly crossed the Channel, 
but arrived at the hospital too late to see him 
alive. She travelled back alone, and her mother 
said, " We sat in this room dreading her arrival. 
We watched the garden gate, and wondered what 
we could say to her when she came, and how we 
could comfort her. She came at last, just as the 



96 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

darkness fell, and directly we saw her we knew 
that it was she who would comfort us, not we 
who could comfort her. She was perfectly com- 
posed; she came up the garden path quietly and 
proudly. I could not have imagined it possible. 
All I can say about it is, that Dorothy seemed 
to have found the peace that passeth understand- 
mg. 

The words were spoken without tears. We 
rose and went down to dinner, and a more cheer- 
ful meal I never shared. In the middle of the 
meal the youngest girl arrived. She left home 
every morning at six o'clock to work in a muni- 
tion factory on the other side of London. There 
was but one son in the family, and he was a sol- 
dier in France. He also had lately been home 
on leave, bringing with him a knapsack shot 
through with shrapnel. The war had revolu- 
tionised the entire life of this family. Yet it 
had left no touch of gloom. Often, in the old 
days, I had talked with my friend on the serious 
things of life, for he was one of the few men I 
knew who possessed a philosophic mind. After 
dinner he began to talk of life and death, quite 
naturally, in quite the old way. When I hap- 
pened to mention his father, who had died years 
before, saying how I wished he could be with us, 
he said simply, '' I have no doubt he is with us 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 97 

now. He has probably watched you eating your 
dinner at the table where he so often sat, and 
I'm quite sure he was pleased that you enjoyed 
it." He did not say it, but I knew he meant me 
to imply that his daughter's husband was with us, 
too. He also, in his total repudiation of death 
as anything but a momentary pause in being, 
had found the peace that passeth understanding. 
I may admit that these dear friends of mine 
were unusual people. They had inherited and 
developed a certain strain of fineness. But I met 
the same attitude of mind in humble men and 
women, who could boast of no such heritage. I 
made a point of searching out some of them who 
had lost sons and husbands, and on the lips of 
none did I hear a single bitter or resentful word. 
They had given the most precious treasure that 
they had to the Cause, and they were proud to do 
it. They had risen, not by virtue of a special 
culture, but by native greatness of spirit, to meet 
supreme occasions. What shall we say of the 
widow, who when she was informed of the death 
of her only son, replied, " My greatest sorrow is 
that I have not another son to give "? Or how 
shall we estimate the heroism of the country pas- 
tor's wife, who received the telegram announcing 
her son's death on Sunday morning, and locked 
it up till night had come, because she did not wish 



98 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

her husband to learn the bitter news till all his 
Sabbath duties were fulfilled? Such acts truly 
surpass human nature. Of the rare hero of his- 
tory we expect them : his allies 

Are exaltations, agonies, 
And love, and man's unconquerable mind. 

The miracle is to find them latent in all human 
hearts, to discover a whole nation capable of 
heroic tempers which we supposed the sole pos- 
session of the lofty few. 

ni 

The effect upon my own mind of these experi- 
ences will be readily perceived. 

Living in America, among people who had 
been called upon to make no active sacrifices for 
the war, my position was isolated and peculiar. 
I was the recipient of much sympathy and consid- 
eration, but this very consideration had the effect 
of fixing my own thoughts more thoroughly upon 
the features of my own case. This is not good 
for a man. It magnifies his burden, and makes 
it impossible for him to forget it. Every sym- 
pathetic word uttered by persons whose own lives 
run smoothly, emphasises the tragedy of his own 
life, and sets him thinking anew of the pang of 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 99 

parting and the loneliness of separation. It 
helps to keep alive his resentment of the blow that 
has shattered his schemes of happiness, and by so 
much weakens his fortitude. 

In visiting England I attained a new^ perspec- 
tive. My case ceased to be peculiar ; it w^as com- 
monplace. No one w^as prepared to waste senti- 
ment upon me, because every one had risen above 
the need of sentimental consolation. The path 
that I had thought solitary proved to be a 
thronged road. I was one of millions, who car- 
ried the same Cross up the same Calvary. And 
there w^as a stern reality in this catholicity of suf- 
fering. It burned out self-pity, and all the weak- 
ness that self-pity breeds. Job, afflicted by a 
calamity that is solitary, fills the world with bit- 
ter outcry; had the houses of all his friends, with 
their children and their cattle, been destroyed by 
the same earthquake that ruined him, he would 
have been ashamed of personal complaint. Col- 
lective calamity creates collective courage. When 
one house in a city burns there is general com- 
miseration, but when a whole city burns, its citi- 
zens forget their ow^n losses, and at once combine 
in a brave effort to rebuild it. 

England was rebuilding her City. Much had 
been destroyed. The old life of careless ease 
had vanished, never to return. Wrecked homes 



loo THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

were everywhere. No class had escaped the dev- 
astating whirlwind. The landed gentry and the 
aristocracy had suffered equally with the peasant 
and the artisan. Forty-seven heirs of noble fam- 
ilies had been slain in battle, and great titles, 
which represented centuries of public service, 
were threatened with extinction. The heads of 
great businesses had no sons left to whom they 
could bequeath their fortunes. Poets and men 
of letters had perished. These were conspicuous 
in their death, but the clerk also had left his desk, 
the workman his job, to die upon the fields of 
Flanders with the same devotion. In a real 
sense, which before the war would have been 
unthinkable, all class distinctions had disappeared. 
The nation was one, and this unprophesied unity 
had been accomplished by a common suffering. 

The same result will no doubt be accomplished 
in America before the war is done. The real 
unity of nations is not achieved through shared 
prosperity but through shared suffering. In a 
recent letter written from the Front, I read the 
words, " Here, in the trenches, it is the sharing 
which is the truly wonderful thing. Oh, the joy 
of the sharing." The letter was written by an 
ordinary man, but he had discovered something 
that made him extraordinary. England had 
made the same discovery. Losing her life, she 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR loi 

had gained it. The divine spirit of sharing had 
given her a real unity which she had never known. 
And so, she was rebuilding her City, but upon a 
nobler plan. Individualism was dead; it was re- 
placed by a sacrificial collectivism. And one ef- 
fect of that new collectivism was to extirpate the 
egoism of personal suffering. She had no time or 
patience for vain self-pity. She sat amid the 
wreckage of the past, austere and strong, with 
wide eyes fixed upon the future. She demanded 
from all her children courage. She regarded 
agony as a commonplace. She made me feel that 
in giving three sons to her service I had done no 
more than I ought to do, and that to have done 
less would have meant dishonour. I had done no 
more than multitudes of men had done, and had 
I done less I should have been unworthy of her 
motherhood. 

I would not be interpreted as saying that the 
England of 1916 was flawless in her virtues. 
Old habits of thought are not broken in a moment, 
although there may be created in some decisive 
moment the force which finally destroys them. 
There were here and there obscure persons who 
clung to the fragments of an exploded pacifism. 
Hidden in some safe occupation one might dis- 
cover now and then a miserable youth, who had 
dodged the call of duty, and was ashamed to 



102 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

walk the streets, beneath the eyes of men in khaki. 
But these were the exceptions, and for them, in 
the long run, conscription waited. Nor was this 
re-birth of virtue, as I have already said, attended 
by any features that were the specific product of 
religion. It was composed of elements that lie 
deeper than conventional religion. It was the 
forcing up of hidden strata which lie beneath all 
religions. It was the essential soul of the nation, 
resurgent through the wreckage of many conven- 
tional beliefs, a little amazed at itself, not yet 
fully able to articulate its faith, but conscious of 
a new faith based on the reality of things, in the 
strength of which it would shape and inherit a 
diviner future. 

This was my second vision of War. The first 
had revealed only the destructive force. When 
the first great thunder-clap of battle broke upon 
the world I was so dismayed that I would have 
been glad to die. I had no desire left to live in 
a world which had learned so little from the fol- 
lies of the past, that it was willing to repeat them 
with an utter disregard of the voice of wisdom 
and experience. When the dark fringes of the 
storm began to sweep across my own life, I was 
still conscious only of its destructive force. It 
was about to root up my happiness, and scatter 
my house of life in unconsidered ruin. But this 



THE SECOND VISION OF WAR 103 

second vision of War revealed a constructive 
force, steadfastly at work beneath visible de- 
struction. I saw its elemental fires burning out 
the unrealities from the thoughts and lives of 
men. I saw it consuming a vast holocaust of 
human shams, as Savonarola once burned the van- 
ities in the Piazza of Florence. He burned the 
wanton book, the lewd picture, the gay apparel, 
the means and instruments of selfish and volup- 
tuous life; this diviner fire was burning up the 
qualities which produced these things. It was 
clean flame, attacking all that was unclean — the 
plague of decadence, the corruption of cowardice, 
the rottenness of selfish living, the foolish pride 
and the still more foolish complacency of stag- 
nant lives. And it did more than destroy the 
evil; it made room for the good to grow and 
thrive. The world lay scorched and sterile for 
a time, as it did when the primal creative fires 
had spent themselves; but the verdure of a new 
Eden began already to appear, and Beauty trod 
behind the footsteps of Destruction. Who was 
I, that I should resist that cosmic process ? How 
great would be my loss if I was not a part of it! 
Rather, was it not my wisdom to embrace the 
cleansing fire, for were there not things in me 
that deserved to perish ? 

I knew that this was so, and in myself I felt 



104 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

the beginnings of a new heart. I saw War re- 
constructing men into a nobler image, and what 
could I do but pray that that image might appear 
in me? This was, in truth, my one supreme 
chance of attaining heroism. Whatever hap- 
pened, this was my immitigable duty, to be wor- 
thy of my sons, and worthy of the great cause to 
which they were devoted. 



THE COMRADE HEART 

I led thee once, but now thy steadier feet 

Move upward, where the cloud and mountains meet. 

And all is changed from that which went before. 

I ant no more thy spirit's creditor. 

But am become thy debtor: I, who lent 

Thee strength, now borrowing thine when mine is spent. 

The Pentecostal Hre that once was mine 
Now leaves ungrudged my brow, and burns on thine. 
And in thy speech, I hear what none may bind, 
— The voices of God's mighty rushing wind. 

For thou hast found great wisdom, O my Son; 
Through singleness of purpose thou hast won 
Thy way through vales of limitless self-shame 
To that firm mind which seeks but loves not fame; 
And last through Faith, that, Hxt on noble ends, 
Bends to its use the plastic will, and bends 
Alike opposing circumstance, the Power 
That overcomes the World and its dark Hour. 

O Thou, my Star, my Light, my other Soul, 

Not separate are we: toward one goal 

Our spirits move upon the wide-drawn arc 

Of common skies, thro' brightness and thro' dark; 

Nor shall it my parental pride displease 

That thou increasest, but that I decrease. 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 



A strange thing is happening in these days : the 
children are educating their parents. This is a 
war of youth. In the long lines of battle is ar- 
rayed the youth of nations. From many thou- 
sands of homes the eyes of parents are fixed upon 
the sons who carry the family name and honour 
in their hands. The larger aspects of the war 
are concentrated in the soldier-son ; for the parent 
he is the war. The morning newspapers are 
searched for any item that may give the clue to 
his concealed existence, and Arras, Vimy, and 
Lens are not so much vital points in military 
strategy as the theatres of action where he per- 
forms his part. 

The father of a soldier thus finds himself liv- 
ing a new kind of life, as new and strange, though 
in a different way, as the life his son lives. The 
physical world itself is re-made for him. Places 
that were formerly not so much as geographical 
expressions, become focussed in the light of ac- 
107 



io8 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

tuality. He talks familiarly of Ypres, Cource- 
lette, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Saloniki, as though 
he knew them as well as the towns within a day's 
journey of his home. He has a new sense of 
world-politics. A ward election, or at the most 
a Presidential contest, formerly set the high water 
mark of his political activities. He is now thrust 
into a world of larger horizons, the solidarity of 
mankind becomes real to him. He finds his life 
profoundly affected by events happening thou- 
sands of miles away, and he becomes a student of 
these events. It is of immense moment what goes 
on behind the guarded doors of European Chan- 
cellories, what Bernhardi writes or Hindenburg 
may plan, what happens in South Africa or Bag- 
dad, how the line of battle sways beside the Tigris 
or the Jordan. His thoughts have ceased to be 
local and have become cosmopolitan. 

This is but the superficial aspect of the case. 
A more important process is at work in his range 
of ethical conceptions. Like most men, long 
accustomed to security and ease of life, he has 
never paid much attention to the foundations on 
which political security reposes. He has, no 
doubt, a sentimental reverence for liberty. He 
knows enough of history to appreciate its value 
and the heroism of those who have won it for 
him. He takes it for granted that every one val- 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 109 

ues liberty, because he himself values it. But as 
he has grown better off, and comforts have been 
multiplied to him, his love for liberty has become 
a very placid love. Very probably he has grown 
a little critical about its benefits, and in expan- 
sive moments has uttered oracular remarks about 
the peril of liberty degenerating into licence. 
But now that his son has gone to the war, Liberty 
has suddenly assumed a new aspect. He sees it 
as a real thing, and the divinest thing in human 
life. He sees that the true line of cleavage is 
between men who love liberty and men who do 
not; nations that are free, and nations that are 
servile; peoples who prefer martyrdom to tyr- 
anny and peoples who " prefer bondage with ease 
to strenuous liberty." The lines are drawn, the 
camps are set, and he must make his choice. 
His son is serving in the cause of freedom, and he 
must needs follow where his son leads. His son 
has educated him. 

The same thing happens to his theories of hu- 
man government. Hitherto he has not troubled 
himself much about them, for he has been con- 
scious of no need to examine and define them. 
He has assumed that English or American modes 
of government are the best, and has never met a 
man rash or bold enough to contradict him. As 
for Germany, he has been enamoured of her effi- 



no THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

ciency, and has never troubled himself to think 
of what lies behind it. He has had no objection 
to employing German clerks, and has even magni- 
fied their superiority to the native product. He 
has thought the interchange of German professors 
with American in University teaching an excel- 
lent thing, and has very likely planned to send his 
son to Germany to complete his education. Now 
his son has gone to fight Germany, and his eyes 
are opened to the truth about her form of gov- 
ernment. He realises that all her efficiency was 
created for the definite end of world-power. He 
sees that there is an irreconcilable disparity be- 
tween autocratic and free government. He 
knows that his own forms of government make 
for world-peace, and that the autocratic militar- 
ism of Germany as surely makes for world-con- 
flict. He would never have learned these things 
from books. They come to him now in one blind- 
ing flash of truth, when he sees that the mailed 
fist of Germany has thrust itself into his ow^n 
peaceful home, and snatched his son from him. 
His son has educated him. 

His spiritual conceptions, if he have any, have 
suffered a similar transformation. He had taken 
it for granted that War and Christianity were in 
deadly opposition. He has listened every Christ- 
mas — it is perhaps the only occasion in the year 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER iii 

when he goes to church — to admirable homilies 
on peace. He has taken, alas, so much for 
granted ! It has never occurred to him to study 
the actual words of Christ. He has never known 
or has forgotten that Christ used force when He 
scourged a crowd of heartless hucksters out of 
the Temple which they had defiled, that He pre- 
dicted wars, that He once even counselled the 
man who had no sword to buy* one. No religious 
teacher has ever tried to show him the relation 
between war and justice. Why, in any case, 
should he be concerned over such matters? Is 
it not an undoubted fact that the growing human- 
itarian sentiment of society is ceaselessly working 
toward world-peace, and that this sentiment will 
as slowly dissolve the iron sinews of war, as the 
acid dissolves the toughest metal, which is imper- 
vious to the hammer ? Why worry ? The world 
is growing better all the time, and men are grow- 
ing too wise to waste their substance in the mad 
extravagance of war. But now all is altered. 
The secret diabolism of the human heart has 
burst forth in violent explosion. Deeds are be- 
ing done that would disgrace primeval savages. 
Christianity cannot be silent on such outrages, 
and cannot condone them. Christianity cannot 
be indifferent to justice. He sees that now, but 
he would never have seen it unless his son had 



112 THE FArwER OF A SOLDIER 

become a soldiet-. He begins to recognise in his 
son's heroism a more real religion than he had 
ever heard inculcated in Churches. His son has 
educated him. 

These are exawiples of a process very widely 
at work among those who have sons at the War. 
They belong to the surface of events; there are 
other processes pregnant with more subtle and 
important transformations, of which I will speak 
presently. The examples I have used are, how- 
ever, sufiftcient to suggest that the relations be- 
tween the father and the son who is a soldier have 
become paradoxical. The positions formerly oc- 
cupied by each are directly reversed. The son 
becomes the teacher and example, the parent the 
disciple. The son, so long dependent on his fa- 
ther for wisdom, now becomes the prophet of a 
new wisdom, into which he initiates his father. 
Both are treading a path entirely new. For 
neither is any previous experience of life a guide. 
They move upon a dim and perilous way, but it is 
the son who leads. Out of what the son hopes 
and does, endures and suffers, is born a new an- 
nunciation of a new gospel of life and conduct. 
It is a new gospel for the father, quite different 
from all the teachings of tradition, in which he has 
placed his trust. It has to be learnt afresh, in 
all its strange outlines, its spiritual contradictions, 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 113. 

ticularly from the son who has now seen a year 
its dismaying difficulties, its unexpected and orig- 
inal conclusions. 

This gospel I have learnt from my sons, par- 
of dangerous service on the Western Front. 
During all that period he has been my unconscious 
teacher, and I his reverent disciple. 

H 

The chief means of my education have been 
his letters from the Front. They have come with 
a singular regularity, in spite of the havoc 
wrought by the U-boats. We know when to ex- 
pect them ; they arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday 
of each week. These are the conspicuous and 
splendid days for which we live. The other days 
don't count; they are merely the grey links be- 
tween these red-letter days. The mail-man's 
ring at the door is waited for with tense nerves. 
It comes, and the one of us who is down first 
shouts up the stairs to the others, " Letters from 
the Front ! " They lie upon the breakfast table, 
apart from all the others : it is a point of honour 
that they should not be opened till we are all 
present to hear them read aloud. They don't 
look like the other letters. The other letters 
have a prim propriety. They are enveloped in 
good thick paper, and have come through the mail 



114 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

unsoiled. They are like good children in their 
fresh clothes; but these letters are the ragged 
children. They are mud-stained, misused, torn 
at the edges, written in pencil, and the censor has 
left his mark upon them. They have been writ- 
ten anywhere, in wet dug-outs, upon thin grey 
paper, by a guttering candle, with a blunt pen- 
cil. Their paragraphs have been punctuated by 
the roar of guns. They have been folded by a 
tired hand, long after midnight, and have been 
carried to us across fields of carnage. And yet 
they have the sacredness of Gospels: they con- 
tain indeed the Gospel of the Trenches. 

We sit silent for a time after the letter is read, 
trying in vain to visualise the scenes which he 
describes. Perhaps by the same mail there are 
letters from my two younger sons, one at his sol- 
itary post in the wild waters of the Hebrides, the 
other on the coast of Ireland. Their environment 
is at least partially clear to us, for we have seen 
the egg-shell patrol boats hunting their prey like 
alert terriers on the fields of ocean, and, in hap- 
pier times, I have spent holidays on those bare and 
perilous coasts. But these seas of Flanders mud, 
in which the unburied dead are perpetually 
churned up, these abominable desolations swept 
by the flying death of high explosives, these 
lonely observation posts where my son's eyes 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 115 

watch for the unnoticeable movement in some 
distant trench which is the prelude to attack — 
how can we picture these things? Besides, he 
says hardly anything that is definite about them. 
Any mention of peril or discomfort is purely in- 
cidental. He writes as though it were an entirely 
normal thing to be soaked with hours of rain, to 
sleep in wet clothes for nights on end, to play 
cards with a man in a dismal dug-out one night, 
and see him blown to pieces on the morrow, to 
dodge death yourself at all times — all these 
things are in the day's work. He might be writ- 
ing of a foot-ball game — not of this atrocious 
game in which the stakes are life and death; and 
he writes of it just as a healthy-minded boy might 
write of the part he takes in college sports, with 
boyish high spirits and ignorance of danger. 

During the day this letter is always in my 
thoughts. I put down my writing in the middle 
of the morning, and read it through again. It 
means more to me as I read it for myself; I can 
see where the pencilled lines are faint because the 
hand was weary, the half -finished sentence broken 
off, as though he had fallen asleep while writing 
it, woke up, and resumed it with an effort. I 
think I can hear his voice now, thin as an echo, 
a tiny voice, audible from an immense distance, 
like the whisper on a telephone. I think I hear 



ii6 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

him saying, " You know, don't you, why I always 
write in high spirits? I want to encourage you 
three lonely folks at home. And, recollect, I 
really am in high spirits, because Fve never been 
so happy in my life. I've found my happiness 
where I never supposed it was, in doing the hard- 
est thing I know; and because you have just as 
hard a thing to do, I want you to find it in the 
same way. No doubt I do exaggerate my high 
spirits just a little bit for your sakes, but you'll 
understand, won't you?" Yes, I understand, 
and as I put his letter down there flows through 
my heart a new wave of courage created by his 
own. 

There are touches of humour in his letters, per- 
fectly natural and unforced. He can laugh at 
odd incidents, quaint sayings of the men, some- 
times at his own ridiculous predicaments. He 
makes me realise that war is not all horror, and 
that there is some saving sanity in men which en- 
ables them to go through scenes of horror with 
laughter on their lips. I remember Lincoln's say- 
ing that laughter was his " vent " ; if he had not 
laughed he would have died of a frenzied brain 
or a broken heart. I realise that these men whom 
he commands are very human creatures. They 
sing childish songs, act in childish ways, and end 
their letters when they write home with rows of 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 117 

crosses, which stand for kisses, just as a child 
does. War has not debased them, it has not bru- 
taHsed them. War has certainly not destroyed 
the fineness and tenderness of my son's mind. 
He can remember my birthday, cable from the 
trenches his congratulations, and be at pains to 
order from a local florist roses for remembrance. 
I perceive in these letters a new growth of hu- 
man sympathy. All intellectual pursuits are nar- 
rowing. He who lives in a world of thought is 
apt to think a good deal more of thoughts than 
of men. He is tempted to measure all men by 
intellectual values, and to be indifferent toward 
plain and common men, whose defects of edu- 
cation unfit them for intellectual pursuits. I have 
been guilty of that fault, and so, I think, has he. 
But as I read these letters, I am conscious that 
this spirit has entirely disappeared. It matters 
nothing to him that few among his comrades have 
read books, that none have read his own, that 
they are not even aware that he has written any. 
He does not despise them on that account ; it is 
a purely negligible deficiency. His own literary 
tastes remain, of course. He can plan novels 
while he lies in the mud with shrapnel w^histling 
over him. On one occasion, rare and memorable, 
he walks over No Man's Land at night with an 
officer who loves Shakespeare, and they debate to- 



ii8 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

gether the meaning of the sonnets. But he has 
come to see that hterature is a much less thing 
than Hfe. He has found in common men quaU- 
ties which command his reverence. He is one 
with his kind, and his kind is mankind. He has 
achieved the true democratic spirit, become one 
of the real brotherhood of man, and he makes me 
ask myself whether I am not still unwisely rev- 
erent of intellectual values in men, and not always 
wisely conscious of those broader qualities which 
make all men my brothers. 

In this new standard of values courage stands 
first. This is the supreme test of the soldier. 
Though he have the mind of a Shakespeare, and 
speak with the tongue of angels, and understand 
all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not 
courage, yet is he but as sounding brass or a 
tinkling cymbal. Dare he go forward when the 
call comes, in simple obedience to duty? If he is 
detailed to creep out over the rotting dead at 
midnight, and cut the wire of the Hun's defences, 
will he go without hesitation? When the guns 
must be pushed forward to what is called a " sac- 
rifice " position, will he be the first to volunteer, 
never thinking of his own peril? Does he realise 
the corporate unity of an army, and therefore 
realise that other men's lives are in his hands, and 
that he must think of others before himself? 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 119 

These are the daily tests which War imposes. 
To survive them is to win one's own self-respect, 
and the respect of others; to fail is to forfeit 
both. The fictitious values of life are all stripped 
away under the test of battle. Only the naked 
soul of a man is left. Has it what the soldier 
calls " a yellow streak " ? Fear it may have, but 
has it the will to conquer fear? Does it reveal 
itself as pure, divine, indomitable flame, a spirit- 
ual dynamic that can control the body, and drive 
it to a task from which every nerve in the body 
shrinks? To discover in oneself this spiritual 
essence which dominates the body is to find the 
highest human happiness ; to find it lacking is to 
be disgraced and miserable. 

The joyousness of these letters springs from 
the discovery of the spiritual self. In civil life 
its existence was not realised, for there were few 
occasions to evoke it. Sometimes the mind was 
haunted by a shameful suspicion that it did not 
exist. The atmosphere of doubt had corroded 
all our thinking, and had ended in doubt of our 
own souls. We were full of self-despisings, and 
we knew we had only too good ground for our 
contempt. The virtue of War is that it reveals 
the best and the worst in a man. It is a re- 
hearsal of the Day of Judgment. When it re- 
veals a Best, of whose existence we were doubt- 



120 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

ful, what wonder that a man is full of joy? 
For these letters are joyous. I compare them 
with other letters, written in the years of peace. 
These earlier letters were written in scenes of 
beauty, from the benignant solitude of moun- 
tains, from London, from grey French cities, 
" half as old as time,'' where life is a lyric still, 
on whose air the music of the Troubadour still 
vibrates. But in spite of all that made for joy, 
in none of these letters do I find the authentic 
joy that throbs in these battle-letters. There is 
always an undercurrent of dissatisfaction, a whis- 
pered question whether after all life is quite 
worth while. In these letters that perturbing 
•question is quite silenced. No doubt about life 
being worth while, for life is now expressing the 
best that is in it. Outward beauty is not neces- 
sary to its pleasure, and outward horror cannot 
diminish it. It springs from within. It is the 
profound satisfaction of a soul that has realised 
itself. One of these letters records that one day, 
in the interval of gun-fire, he heard a lark sing- 
ing with untroubled sweetness in the grey sky. 
So here, above the grim facts of filth and corrup- 
tion, the soul sings joyously, drawing its joy from 
within itself, and not from exterior conditions 
which are hopelessly at variance with joy. To 
receive these letters is, as it were, to hear the 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 121 

lark-song of hope, out of the grey sky that often 
covers us. 

For Hfe is often grey with us. There is 
no escape from the apprehension that walks 
stealthily behind us, inseparable as our own 
shadows. We cannot hear the 'phone ring with- 
out the dread of what message it may bring. We 
hurry back from this or that engagement, won- 
dering what may have happened in our absence. 
Our first anxious glance is toward the hall-table, 
where perchance a cablegram may greet us. Our 
heart strings are tied to that life far away, and 
not seldom they tremble with baseless premoni- 
tion. It is hard to fulfil the round of public and 
social duties under these conditions. Sympa- 
thetic people sometimes say, " How brave you 
are ! " But I know that I am not braver than 
they, in my natural qualities. I have a melan- 
cholic tendency. I have a painful gift of imagi- 
nation. When I am separated from those I love 
I am apt to construct poignant dramas of all the 
dreadful things that may have happened to them. 
I have never seen one of my children sail for 
Europe without vivid pictures of shipwreck, 
which have filled my waking and my sleeping 
thoughts. I have never conquered these habits 
of mind, and they are still unconquered. But yet 
something has happened to me that has nega- 



122 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

tived their force. I can thrust them aside by an 
effort of the wiU. I can go about the business of 
my life with calmness of temper. I ask how this 
has come to pass, and I know the answer. I 
hear continually the lark's song out of the grey 
sky. I hear the voice of Courage, of Faith, of 
Joy, travelling to me from those distant battle- 
fields. I realise that to be unhappy is a form of 
cowardice, and that all true happiness is the fruit 
of courage. If my resolution fail, I have only 
to read these letters again, and they act on me as 
a tonic. The impression they leave is never of 
the visible horror of death and carnage ; it is of 
the invisible spirit of man, triumphing over cir- 
cumstance, rising above fear, acclaiming itself di- 
vine and unconquerable. From my sons I draw 
whatever fortitude I may possess. They have 
educated me in the school of their own courage. 



Ill 

I have used the phrase, " the Gospel of the 
Trenches.'* It has a somewhat strange sound, 
and, as I weigh it, I am aware that it may be con- 
sidered by some people paradoxical, and even 
profane. They will say that Gospel is a word 
of exquisite traditions, a synonym for infinite 
tenderness and love and consolation. But is it 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 123 

only that ? It seems to me that the Galilean Gos- 
pel, out of which the world has built its faith, 
is infinitely stern as well as infinitely tender. It 
commands loyalty to conviction in the face of 
death. It bids men hold in scorn those who slay 
the body, and after that have no more that they 
can do. It makes the claim of truth superior to 
the claim of life. When truth comes into colli- 
sion with love, it counsels men to forsake father 
and mother, wife and children, lands and houses, 
for the sake of truth. It praises them when they 
do this ; it condemns them when they do not. It 
is above all things an heroic Gospel, a gospel that 
demands heroes and creates them. 

That is my justification for the phrase, " the 
Gospel of the Trenches," for the message that 
has come to me from these fields of death is 
based upon the same view of conduct and the 
same spiritual sanctions which were enunciated 
long ago in Galilee. I begin to perceive certain 
forgotten truths about that Galilean Gospel and 
its Master. I find I have been deceived by the 
stress laid upon His meekness and His lowliness ; 
even by the emphasis put upon His lovingness. 
These qualities have been interpreted to me as 
amiability. But I see now that Christ was not 
an amiable person, for amiability is weakness. 
An amiable Christ would never have given de- 



124 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

liberate offence to the rulers of his nation, and 
would not have been crucified. He would never 
have insisted on men forsaking all whom they 
loved to follow Him; He would have been too 
tender-hearted. There was a sternness in His 
character which made Him terrible. He was 
against all soft and selfish modes of life. He 
could be pitiful toward error, but He had no 
mercy on complacent ease and deliberate coward- 
ice. The whole impact of His life and teaching 
was to create heroes, and He did create them out 
of the most unpromising material. 

So I find in these letters something that may 
be called a Gospel. It is the Gospel of Heroism. 
It is the story of men who have left all things for 
the sake of a paramount duty. They are not 
soldiers by choice; they are civilians who have 
become soldiers under the compulsion of a di- 
vine call. It is probable that few of them would 
put it in that way. They are quite unconscious 
of their own heroism. If we met them they 
would not remind us in the least of saints and 
apostles. They have faults, and some of them 
have vices. Their virtues they are accustomed 
to disguise; they would count it immodest to dis- 
play them. But the virtue is there, that suprem.e 
virtue of self-surrender to which Christianity it- 
self makes its appeal, in response to which men 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 125 

exceed their own natures, and become the true 
supermen of the realms of the spirit. 

They are unwilling to display their virtues; 
it is also probable that few of them are capable 
of stating their creed. Its most articulate article 
is a certain quiet reconciliation with death. A 
friend has just left my house whose boy has 
been home on his last leave before going over- 
seas. He is only eighteen, and young for his 
age. He has been trying to enlist ever since his 
seventeenth birthday. He succeeded at last, and 
joined by choice a branch of the service which 
is generally regarded as the most dangerous. 
Speaking of him, his father said, ''Of course he 
expects to die. They all do." The words were 
uttered calmly, as though they expressed a com- 
monplace! How does a boy of eighteen arrive 
at such a thought? There is only one way, the 
profound conviction that death is not the great 
disaster which a comfortable civilisation supposes 
it to be. Years do not make a life. Deeds af- 
ford the only authentic measurement of life. 
Life is a quality of the spirit over which death 
has no power. There is no greater victory pos- 
sible to the spirit of a man than the temper which 
ignores death at the call of duty. This boy of 
eighteen has won that victory. All these men of 
whom my son writes have won it, won it so 



126 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

completely that when volunteers are asked for 
some perilous service, from which it is certain 
only one or two can return, the difficulty is not 
to find volunteers, but to restrain the men who 
jostle and outbid one another in the effort to 
secure the chance of dying. 

I notice a curious change in myself in my at- 
titude to War : I have ceased to be acutely con- 
scious of its horror. I do not mean that I have 
ceased to think of War as abominable, and of its 
wholesale destruction of human life as atrocious. 
I am indeed much more sensitive to what this de- 
struction means than in the early days of the 
war, because it is interpreted to me to-day in the 
threat that hangs over lives very dear to me. 
Nevertheless, I find my mind dwelling less and 
less upon the spectacle of physical destruction. 
Why is this ? I think it is because I have become 
more conscious of the spiritual grandeur of War. 
I have realised that man is so much more than 
his body that the loss of the body is not the loss 
of the man. I have learned to think of the body 
of a soldier as the vesture only of the spirit, and 
of the spirit as stepping out of its torn and blood- 
stained vesture in the vigour of indestructible 
existence. 

This belief is, of course, a traditional belief, 
inculcated by the Christian religion ; but like most 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 127 

traditional beliefs it has little real vitality, and 
no firm grip upon the mind. I know how little 
real vitality it has had for me by the pains which 
I have taken to maintain it. I have buttressed it 
by all sorts of vulnerable analogies drawn from 
nature, by the chance words of science, by the 
assertions of poets, by the rare conviction that 
visits the mind when a great man disappears from 
the theatre of action that the qualities of his mind 
and character cannot be utterly extinguished. 
But the doubt remains, and for one analogy that 
points to the survival of human personality, a 
hundred suggest its extinction. It is probable 
that most intellectual men who have a real interest 
in religion, in their secret thoughts never move 
far beyond the dying declaration of John Ster- 
ling, that he anticipated death with much of 
hope, and no fear. 

But this belief, so solemn and consoling, has 
become to me a real belief to-day, strong enough 
to stand firm without the vain buttresses of pre- 
carious analogies. I have learned it from no 
theologian; I have been persuaded to it by no 
elaborate argument; it is the natural deduction 
drawn from the grim but splendid facts of war. 
It is the soldier's faith. The soldier sees his 
comrade, who yesterday was a sentient, thinking, 
foreseeing creature, smashed into pulp by an ex- 



128 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

plosive shell. His body has disappeared so com- 
pletely that only a handful of pitiful fragments 
remain to witness that it once existed. He is no 
philosopher, but some inward voice assures him 
that this handful of battered clay is not his com- 
rade. He speaks of him not as dead, but as 
" gone west." The west for him represents all 
that was most precious in life — the prairie 
farm, the ranch house in its orchards, the child, 
the wife, the home he loved and toiled for — so 
he has " gone west." The phrase is not to be 
analysed, but its implication is clear — the body 
scattered in the mire of Flanders is not the man. 
The man has passed on, and taken with him all 
that composed his personality, his gaiety and 
courage, his unselfishness and heroism, and all 
" the endearing blend of his faults and virtues." 
The tragic ease with which the body vanishes 
from sight conveys the sense of something un- 
real in his disappearance. So, in his simple w^ay, 
not arguing the matter or being capable of argu- 
ment, the soldier assumes human immortality 
as a necessity of thought. He could not go on 
with the work of war without it. He could not 
believe in God unless he believed that the spirit 
of a man returned to God, when the red earth 
received the poor remnants of the broken body. 
He stands upon a field covered with the dead. 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 129 

and hears his Commander say,* " As regards our 
comrades who have lost their lives, — let us speak 
of them with our caps off — my faith in the Al- 
mighty is such that I am perfectly sure that when 
men die, doing their duty and fighting for their 
country ... no matter what their past lives 
have been, no matter what they have done that 
they ought not to have done (as all of us do), I 
am perfectly sure that the Almighty takes them 
and looks after them at once. Lads, we cannot 
leave them better than like that.'' He hears the 
brave message, and he accepts it as a vital gos- 
pel; and the words which he may have heard 
many times as an idle boast become to him a 
trumpet sounding over these fields of inhuman 
slaughter, *' O Death, where is thy sting? O 
Grave, where is thy victory?" 

This sublime truth of the survival of person- 
ality has been made vital for me by the letters 
of my son, and by his conversations. In all that 
he has written, in all that he has said, this truth 
is assumed. Again, the father has been edu- 
cated by the son, and this process is going on in 
millions of hearts to-day. The faith in the real 

* Address to the Canadian troops, delivered on the field 
of battle, after twelve days and nights of fighting, from 
April 23rd to May 4th, 191 5, by Lieutenant-General E. A. 
H. Alderson, C.B. 



130 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

spirituality of human life, dimmed by the doubl- 
ings of agnosticism, has recovered its divine lus- 
tre on the battlefield. We have seen but the pil- 
lar of cloud resting on the grave; our sons see 
the pillar of fire. What we have attained by 
painful argument, if indeed we do attain it, they 
have seized by intuition. What creeds ai^rm in 
vain to careless ears, they have heard as the 
Voice of God speaking from the heavens. 
Strange as it may seem, war has strengthened 
faith in personal immortality among those who 
endure its utmost sacrifices, and it would be the 
irony of all ironies if faith in immortality dwin- 
dled in the Churches while it shone resurgent on 
the battlefield. 

I have learned one other thing, which is not a 
light thing to learn, that the fear of sacrifice is 
much more terrible than its reality. I have in 
mind a mother who was half crazed wth grief 
w^hen her son first talked of enlisting. She 
■poured out the fierce resentment of her heart to 
all her friends, and believed she could not live if 
her son became a soldier, and to-day this mother 
is the proudest woman alive. The whole spirit 
of her mind, the entire method of her life, is 
changed. She is first in all war-work, indefati- 
gable in patriotic enterprises, unselfishly giving all 
her energies to public duties ; and it is clear to all 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 131 

who know her that she has learned the joy of sac- 
rifice from her son. This is my own experience, 
as I doubt not it is the experience of multitudes. 
Seen from afar the mountain summit appears 
menacing and inaccessible; but as we approach 
nearer we discover a practicable path. It is 
steep and hard, but nevertheless it can be climbed, 
and there are clear fountains springing from the 
rocks and flowers by the wayside. 

We are all of us, after all, more adaptable 
than we suppose, more flexible, more plastic to 
circumstance. We assure ourselves that there are 
certain conditions of life which we could not en- 
dure. That other people endure them and sur- 
vive them appears to us a miracle, but we tell 
ourselves that we are made of different stuff. 
Some day we find we have to endure them. 
Wealth or health disappears, and we have to begin 
life anew as poor men or as invalids. When 
that test comes we find in ourselves resources of 
courage of which we were unaware. The stuff 
that we are made of proves itself to be pretty 
much the same stuff that all our friends are made 
of, the friends whom we have thought of as spe- 
cial heroes and martyrs. This is the process 
through which I have passed, and through which 
thousands of parents are now passing. There is 
something in the inevitable that calms us. As 



132 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

long as the fate we feared could be evaded, we 
shuddered at it. When Fate at last knocks at our 
door we cease to contend with it. This is what 
I mean when I say that the fear of sacrifice is 
worse than its reality. We fear as we enter into 
the cloud that veils the altar of sacrifice; when 
once we have entered it we see that not only 
cloud but also ineffable brightness rests upon the 
altar. 

As I write this paragraph a letter reaches me 
from a humble woman who belongs to " the gen- 
tle sect called Quakers." She tells me that from 
a tiny income she is giving all she can for the 
war, and spends her time in knitting warm gar- 
ments for " our heroic men " ; but as the months 
of war have become years, and the wrong still 
seems triumphant, her heart had grown very bit- 
ter, she had slowly lost all hope, when there 
came into her hands my son's letters. She read 
them aloud to her daughter while she rolled 
bandages for the Red Cross, and into the hearts 
of these two solitary women crept a beautiful 
uplifting peace, and with it a renewal of hope and 
faith. " Surely," she continues, " no man whose 
spirit shone out so clearly in every page could 
be only a clod of earth, and no men such as those 
he tells us of could fail to be creatures of a God 
such as 1 had almost grown to disbelieve in. 



THE EDUCATION OF A FATHER 133 

Since then, many dark days have come, when 
my heart seemed almost too heavy to begin a new 
day, but my first spoken word when waking with 
such a feeling is * Carry On,' and my first thought 
is of the intense selfishness of our complaining, 
when we know what they are bearing ' out there ' 
for our sakes ; and so I find strength for one more 
day." 

My unknown correspondent speaks for me, 
and for multitudes like myself. The supreme un- 
selfishness, the ungrudged self -surrender, the pa- 
tient and even joyous endurance of the men who 
fight our battles is having a profound effect upon 
the thought of the world. It is giving us a new 
standard of conduct, and is, in effect, the enun- 
ciation of a new religion. Yet it is, after all, 
the old religion whose watchword is that he who 
loseth his life for a purpose superior to self, 
saves it: he who saves his life unworthily loses 
it — only, in our contented security and ease, we 
had forgotten the watchword. It sounds afresh 
to-day from the red fields of war. We begin to 
think of Christ, not as artists have painted Him, 
weeping unavailing tears above the slain in bat- 
tle, but as standing in a strange new pulpit built 
of shattered guns and shattered men, preaching 
the only essential gospel which men care to hear, 
the spirituality of man, the dignity of his soul. 



134 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

the splendour of his faculty for sacrifice. It is 
a hard Gospel, but we are slowly learning it. 
And it is not a gospel of words ; it is a gospel of 
examples. The examples are our own sons, and 
through them we are being educated into truer 
ways of thought, and loftier modes of life. 



THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 

The fog's on the world to-day, 
It will be on the world to-morrow; 

Not all the strength of the sun 

Can drive his bright spears thorough. 

Yesterday and to-day 

Have been heavy with labour and sorrow; 
I should faint if I did not see 

The day that is after to-morrow. 

Hope in the world there is none, 
Norjrom yesterday can I borrow; 

But I think that I feel the wind 
Of the dawn that comes after to-morrow. 

The cause of the peoples I serve 
To-day in impatience and sorrow 

Once more is defeated — and yet 
'Twill be won — the day after to-morrow. 

And for me, with spirit elate 

The mire and the fog I press thorough, 
For Heaven shines under the cloud 

Of the day that is after to-morrow. 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 

I 

In that same room, where, in the Christmas 
of 1 9 14, the words were spoken which were the 
sword of separation thrust through all our pleas- 
ant forms of life, we have met again. My two 
younger sons are not with us; they are busy 
somewhere on the grey waste of the estranging 
seas. Coningsby, more fortunate than they, has 
found the way back to the old home. The visit 
was unexpected, so totally outside all prediction, 
that it seems almost unreal. As we look back 
upon it, it is as though we had dreamed a dream, 
in which a blessed apparition had met us and 
spoken with a human voice. 

First there came the news that he was 
wounded; then hasty scrawls written by an in- 
jured hand, assuring us of his recovery; then a 
cautious message saying that it might be possible 
for him to spend his convalescent leave at home. 
The news was too good to be believed, but at 
least we were encouraged to be hopeful. The 
137 



138 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

summer weeks passed and he did not come. We 
knew now that his pen had been enhsted by the 
Government to prepare an important paper, con- 
taining a brief history of the work done by the 
Canadian forces since the beginning of the war. 
Would the time so spent be counted as his leave, 
or would he still be permitted to claim the two 
months due to him? We did not know, nor did 
he. At last there came a blessed cable, inform- 
ing us that he would leave Liverpool upon a cer- 
tain date. Some one told us that such cables 
were usually delayed till the ship was well at 
sea, or within sight of the port of destination. 
He might actually be landing on the date when 
we received the message. Would it be in Can- 
ada or America? We did not know. Out of 
the mysterious and secret seas he would appear 
presently, and we knew no more. 

We decided that he was almost certain to land 
in Canada, and hurried off to Montreal. We 
were summering in a small Canadian village at 
the time, upon the shores of Lake Ontario, in a 
simple hostelry known as The Village Inn. It 
was Sunday w^hen the cable came, and it amuses 
me to recollect that we left in such haste that I 
had to borrow all the money in the exchequer of 
the Inn, for the bank was closed, and, I was in- 
formed, all its cash was in a safe whose time- 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 139 

lock could not be opened until Monday morning. 
Perhaps we should not have made so swift an 
exodus but for the counsel of a young aviator 
who assured us that he had received just such 
a cable from his brother, and discovered later 
that the cable and his brother had arrived simul- 
taneously. The good folk staying with us in the 
Inn were almost as excited as ourselves. They 
had sons and brothers in the war, and could un- 
derstand. A father whose son would come back 
no more saw us off, and helped us with our bag- 
gage, betraying by no word or sign his sense 
of the contrast between our happiness and his 
own desolation of spirit. We were to have met 
that afternoon a lady whose husband had been 
killed, whose only son was a prisoner in Ger- 
many, from whom no news had come for six 
months. We did not meet her because it would 
have seemed like parading our own gladness be- 
fore her mournful eyes. But probably we were 
wrong in this excess of sensitiveness, for among 
all these Canadian folk there was more than 
fortitude; there was that unselfish temper which 
rejoices in another's joy while one's own heart 
is broken. 

At Montreal there was no news. The mili- 
tary authorities showed us every courtesy, but 
they knew nothing. Our cherished plan to meet 



I40 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

Coningsby the moment he should land broke 
down, just as a similar plan had broken down 
some months before in London, when he was 
returning on his first leave from the Front. 
War has no concern in individual dramas. We 
waited three days, haunting the railway station, 
seeing wounded men arrive and men departing 
from their last leave, and then reluctantly re- 
turned to New York. A week passed in silence, 
and then came the telegram saying that Con- 
ingsby was at Quebec. The next night he ar- 
rived in New York. There was a frenzied meet- 
ing at the Grand Central Station, which the stolid 
spectators watched with some amusement. The 
stentorian official, who ropes off the waiting 
crowd with such callous insolence, must have 
been amazed as well as amused, for his rope was 
of no avail against an excited mother and sister 
who dodged beneath it, and hung upon the neck 
of their returning soldier. 

H war brings hours of agony, it also has its 
great exalted moments. Not till that moment 
when we stood on the Grand Central Station, did 
we realise how keen had been the dread that our 
last separation might be final. That we should 
really see him again had in it all the wonder of 
a resurrection. The father's words, in Christ's 
tenderest parable, rang in my ears : *' This my 



THE ILVrPY WARRIOR 141 

son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and 
is found.'' It was worth paying months of pain 
for that moment. All the long arrears of sor- 
row were overpaid in that supreme happiness. 

II 

For a month he has lived with us, and I am 
now able to understand, as I never did before, 
his attitude to life. Letters written from the but- 
tlefield may be never so truthful and sineere, but 
they are apt to be the record of exceptional moods 
of feeling and experience. Eefore the sobering 
and solemn vision of death, never absent for a 
day or for an hour, the soul may rise to great 
heights, not afterwards sustained. From mounts 
of transfiguration we come down to tlie petty 
atmosphere of common life, and men do not al- 
ways bring their transfiguration with them. The 
first impression I record is that with my son the 
transfiguration of mind and character is per- 
manent. It did not fade into the light of com- 
mon day, nor lose its lustre when brought into 
contact with the commonplace of life. 

Amid so much that was abnormal, he had re- 
mained normal. Much had been added to his 
life, but its original texture was unchanged. He 
was as boyish as ever in his simple love of life. 



142 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

as sweet-tempered and considerate, as eager to 
please and to be pleased. Had he sat in sombre 
silence, with his inward eye fixed upon the hor- 
rors he had seen, I could have understood it and 
forgiven him. I had prepared myself for some- 
thing of the kind, but I found I had been mis- 
taken. Why, he could even jest, and play off 
practical jokes on me in quite the old irreverent 
style. It is a little thing to mention, but not 
without significance, that one day he dressed up 
a fifteenth century life-size figure of an eminent 
saint which I possess in my hat and coat, and 
with elaborate seriousness informed me that a 
famous editor was waiting for mc in the drawing- 
room ; much enjoying my discomfiture when I 
returned from a silent interview with this strange 
efiigy. As long as a man can jest and enjoy a 
jest, we are under no doubt of his normality. 

I had often wondered whether at the termina- 
tion of the war he w^ould be able to resume his 
old interests in life and literature. He himself 
had shared that wonder, for he knew not only 
how the big things of war make all other things 
look insignificant, but how the mind, withdrawn 
from daily tasks, grows indifferent to them, and 
loses the efftciency to perform them. But on the 
third day after reaching home he appeared at 
breakfast in the old tweeds he used to wear while 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 143 

writing. The soldier, with his uniform, had dis- 
appeared; his place was taken by the writer. 
After breakfast he went quietly to his little study 
in the top of the house, and in a few hours was 
hard at work upon a book. Looking into the 
room, I saw a scene familiar by years of use and 
wont — the writing-board upon his knees, his 
head bent over it, and a cloud of tobacco smoke 
that hung like a misty aura round him. It seemed 
as though he had never been away. He had 
stepped back into the normal as a derailed wheel 
fits its flange to the rail again, and glides smoothly 
on its way. His mind, deflected from its true 
task by a violent force, resumed it again with 
perfect naturalness the moment the pressure was 
removed. The hand that had fired so many guns 
resumed the pen with delightful ease, and that 
range of faculty for which war had no use, 
proved to be not abandoned or destroyed, but 
only in abeyance. 

People who talk with prophetic melancholy and 
misgiving of the brutalising effects of war, may 
find something in these facts that is worth their 
consideration. War is certainly inhuman, but it 
does not dehumanise. It is a false rhetoric 
which labels it as " organised murder." It is 
rather organised justice, and a passion for jus- 
tice exalts rather than debases men. It is hatred 



144 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

that dehumanises men, hatred which is the root 
of murder ; but the singular thing is that men can 
be engaged in a collective antagonism without 
any spirit of hatred toward individuals. The 
British soldier does not hate the personal an- 
tagonist whom he calls half -humorously and 
half -affectionately '' Fritzie " ! He has to kill 
him if he can, but since there is no hatred in his 
killing, the deed has no relation to the crime of 
murder. A very brief moment of reflection is 
sufficient to assure us that the man whose trade 
is war is by no means deficient in the virtues of 
pity and humanity. Some of the greatest sol- 
diers have been both the most tender-hearted and 
the most pious of men. Robert E. Lee remained 
a great Christian through all the slaughter of the 
Civil War, and Lord Roberts was an eminently 
pious man. What war really does is to develop 
the sterner virtues of a man, as we can all see; 
but it also develops his tenderness and pity by 
the constant appeal made to him by suffering, 
which is something the pacifist is incapable of see- 
ing or of understanding. 

But perhaps it is not necessary to persuade rea- 
sonable persons that there is a strong conserva- 
tive force in human nature which enables men 
to survive abnormal conditions, and glide back 
into normal modes of life with surprising ease. 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 145 

Men continually achieve this transposition. It 
happens after severe sickness, after adventures 
in foreign lands, after great reversals of for- 
tune. There is no reason to suppose that war is 
any exception to the rule. The novel grip of 
event which takes a man from sedentary occu- 
pations and flings him forth as an explorer or a 
lion hunter into the African jungle is as dislocat- 
ing to normal modes of life as the event w^hich 
makes the conventional man a soldier. The re- 
turned explorer and adventurer soon finds his 
place in ordinary life again, and the soldier will 
do the same with an equal adaptability. 

Next to this complete normality of my son, 
the thing that struck me was his absolute tran- 
quillity of spirit. I had remarked this quality in 
his letters, but it was much more impressive in 
the unconscious revelations of his speech. He 
w^as happy, but it was happiness with a difference. 
It had no relation to material desires. 1 do not 
mean that he was indifferent to the wholesome 
pleasures of life, or to the success of his own 
work, but these things were regarded as of rela- 
tive unimportance. They were worth having, 
but only as pleasant accessories, not as vital neces- 
sities of life. The agitation of personal ambition 
had disappeared. His happiness sprang from 
within, from the deep fountain of a hidden peace. 



146 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

And, studying this new temper in him, my mind 
recalled the poem of Wordsworth's which he calls 
the Happy Warrior. Wordsworth wrote with 
Lord Nelson in his mind, but also, as he tells 
us, with the memory of his own brother John, 
who was a naval officer to whom was given no 
great occasion of heroic conduct or triumphant 
death. He perished by shipwreck, but W^ords- 
worth recognised in him the same qualities that 
made the great Admiral immortal. The theatre 
of action differed, but the movements of the spirit 
were the same, and are the catholic inheritance 
of all who are governed by the same ideals. 

What these ideals are Wordsworth states at 
length, and I do not wish to recapitulate them. 
But there is one passage which was to me so vi- 
talised by the manifest temper of my son that it 
describes better than my words can do what that 
temper was. The Happy Warrior is he 

Who comprehends his trust, and to the same 
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim, 
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait 
For wealth or honours or for worldly fame; 

Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, 
Or mild concerns of ordinary life, 
A constant influence, a peculiar grace ; 
But who, if he be called upon to face 
Great issues, good or bad for human kind, 



THE PIAPPY WARRIOR 147 

Is happy as a Lover; and attired 
With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired ; 
And through the heat of conflict keeps the law 
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw. 

The lines are capable of an exact analysis, but 
it is enough to remark where Wordsworth dis- 
covers the authentic root of happiness. It is in 
the satisfaction of being able to meet great issues. 
It is in the noble self -acclamation of a soul that 
has vindicated its capacity for heroism. The 
Happy Warrior now sees what he foresaw, but 
sees it not only without dismay, but with the 
calm resolution of a mind bent on high ends, and 
dedicated to them. 

In those long conversations which we had 
through those brief crowded weeks of renewed 
communion, there was no attempt made to dis- 
guise the horrors of war. Neither were they 
paraded. To him they seemed not remarkable. 
We drew them from him, for he was unwilling 
to lay stress on them. The thing he did lay stress 
upon was the spiritual significance of the things 
he had witnessed and endured. We saw, through 
his eyes, men driving their guns into battle over 
dead and living bodies, intent only on the imme- 
diate duty which brooked no delay. We saw 
maimed men, without the least consciousness of 
heroism, giving up their own turn for medical 



148 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

attention for the benefit of others worse wounded 
than themselves. We saw young officers writing 
their last letters home before going into action, 
with the clear knowledge that they would be dead 
in a few hours, yet with perfect calmness. We 
learned for the first time that Coningsby had 
once written us such a letter which fortunately 
never reached us. It was during the attack on 
Lens, in which he was wounded. He wrote to 
his sailor brothers full instructions what to do if 
he fell, among these instructions being one that 
they should send money to a Newark florist, pro- 
viding for his weekly gift of flowers to us, to be 
continued for a year after his death. "I allowed 
myself to have a foolish presentiment that day," 
he said, with a smile. " That kind of thing hap- 
pens to all of us at times. As a rule we never 
think much of peril, but this time I did, and you 
see how foolish I was." 

I think he would not have realised that the 
stories he had to tell were of any value, unless we 
had persuaded him to the contrary. They were 
the commonplaces of his daily life, and why 
should other folk think them remarkable? He 
was even unwilling at first to wear his uniform 
in the streets, because he did not wish to be stared 
at as exceptional. It was only when he reaUsed 
that America also wore khaki that he resumed his 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 149 

own. If I had not persuaded him to employ a 
court stenographer to record his three public 
speeches, much that he had to tell would have 
been lost. There was a modesty in this tem- 
per, but it was not altogether modesty; it was 
the sincere conviction that anything that he and 
his comrades had done was " all in the day's 
work," and deserved no special praise. 

He spoke of these comrades in arms with deep 
affection. 

" Queer to recollect how I once valued men for 
their intellectual sympathies, isn't it? But we've 
learned not to judge each other in that way. 
We've found each other's spiritual qualities. 
When a man leaps forward to take a missile 
meant for you, you don't inquire whether he's 
read your books. You yourself forget you've 
ever written any. All you remember is that he's 
a true kind of super-man, and you can't think of 
anything finer than to be a little bit like him." 

He spoke sometimes of death with a kind of 
quiet scorn. He had no desire to die — far from 
it — and he believed he would not. But he had 
found out that the intimidation of death was a 
vain thing. The terror men felt at death was 
based on a false idea of death as abnormal. We 
saw it in isolated instances. But where you saw 
it in the mass it became normal. It was as 



150 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

catholic as birth. It was as common as breath- 
ing. 

" I've seen too many men die to be afraid of 
death," he said. "What odds is it when a man 
dies? He knows he has to die sometime, and 
one time is as good as another. The great thing 
is not when and where a man dies, but how. 
Life is not a matter of days, but of quahties. 
I'd rather die at the height of my best intention 
than Hve many years and sink finally below my- 
self. If I knew I was going back to die, I should 
still go, because I know I couldn't die better 
than in doing something great. I really grudge 
every day I'm away from the chaps in the 
trenches. That doesn't mean, of course, that 
I'm not glad to be home. You understand that. 
But I know what the men are suffering, and how 
every man counts, and I hate to be out of it, 
when I might be of some use. I felt that in Lon- 
don during my first leave. I felt that I ought 
not to be taking my pleasure while my battery 
perhaps was being shot to pieces. You get to 
feel that way. It's a strange thing, but do you 
know I'm really happier in my own mind amid 
all the mud and blood, than I am when I'm away 
from it?" 

That was his constant recurring testimony: he 
was happy. He was happy through a certain 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 151 

unification of life, the bending of the will to one 
deliberate purpose which was not personal. 
" The weight of chance desires " was lifted from 
his heart. Life was no longer self-centred. It 
is a very old discovery, made afresh by every 
saint and hero ; but in civil life it is hard to make 
it, because the occasions of heroism are not thrust 
on one. War brings the occasion to every man. 
It challenges men, summons them to a new val- 
uation of their aims in life, and makes the pursuit 
of personal happiness appear a sorry business. 
It offers them, even the humblest of them, the 
rare joy of self-renunciation. 

" You know how I have always loved France/' 
he said, " and you remember my intense pleas- 
ure in visiting Tours, Les Baux, and all those 
other lovely places where romance lingers, and 
beauty seems indestructible. Yet, as I recall my 
feelings, I know that even then I was not truly 
happy. I had an uneasy sense that I was only 
seeing France with an artist's eye, and using her 
as a means for my own gratification. The 
France I see to-day is a battered waste of mud 
and ugliness. It is pock-marked with shells, its 
soil reeks with corruption, and there's not even 
a tree left. Yet I am happier among these shat- 
tered French towns than I ever was at Tours and 
Les Baux. I suppose it is because in the old days 



T52 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

T was taking something from France, and now 
I'm giving something to her. It makes a won- 
derful difference whether your life is taking or 
giving." 

And there, no doubt, for him and for others, is 
found the real root of happiness. It withers in 
the soil of self, it thrives in the soil of self-re- 
nunciation. Fed with too much sunshine it bears 
the poisonous flower of egoistic satisfaction; 
nourished with blood it blossoms with the lily 
of peace, and carries in its heart the light that 
never was on sea or land. 

He made no claim for special bravery and dis- 
liked to hear the subject named. His brothers, 
he said, were braver than he, because they had 
a task quite as hard, but much more monotonous. 
He, at least, had his thrilling moments, but they 
came much less frequently in the life of the sailor 
than the soldier. To search the seas incessantly 
for an enemy who was rarely visible is a harder 
test of courage than to go over the top in the 
supreme moment of attack. In such moments 
the soldier finds an exceeding great reward for 
all his weary days of drudging preparation. The 
mind flies up, winged with exaltation. The man 
who has grouched over trivial discomforts, or 
has worked sulkily at the daily task, in such 
hours burns w4th the fierce joy of contest. He 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 153 

asks no greater reward than to plunge into a 
German trench and come to actual grips with his 
enemy. 

" Courage is a curious quality," he said. " It 
exists in every one, but most men don't know 
they have it till the occasion calls for it. The 
man you thought a coward is quite as likely to 
display it as the man you always knew to be a 
fine fellow. The times when I have needed my 
courage most were not in the hours of extreme 
peril. It came then of itself, rose up from some 
depth within me. The most trying times were 
the long days of beastly discomfort and exertion 
for no immediate end. The courage I needed 
then didn't come of itself. It wasn't a sudden 
blaze that set the heart glowing. It was a little 
spark that had to be fanned into flame. It was 
a thing of principle, not of temper. Do you 
understand? And that, I think, is the highest 
kind of courage, and the hardest to attain." 
. He thought that religion, like courage, was in- 
digenous in men. All men had it, in its ele- 
mental essence, but few of the men he lived with 
knew much about its forms. Probably they 
couldn't satisfy the most lenient Church on earth 
that they were proper candidates for member- 
ship, but they had nevertheless what Cromwell 
called " the root of the matter " in them. 



154 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

"An army's very like a school/' he said. 
" The cardinal ethic of the schoolboy is that he 
must play the game. That's the top-notch of 
school-boy morality. The soldier reasons just 
in the same way. If a man plays the game, God 
will look after him, and he'll be all right what- 
ever happens. If he doesn't, it won't do him 
much good to go sneaking to God with all sorts 
of excuses, for God won't listen to him. Read- 
ing the Bible, praying and singing hymns, are 
very good things in their way, but they aren't 
religion. Religion is doing your bit, and not 
letting other fellows down because you fail to 
do it. The men judge the chaplains entirely by 
that test. They won't listen to a man, if they 
think he isn't as brave as they are; but if he 
never shirks, and is willing to face peril with 
them, they believe in him, and anything that he 
says to them about right living goes. I've known 
lots of religious people, but I very often think 
that the most truly religious men I have met are 
these chaps who don't appear to have any reli- 
gion at all." 

"What will happen when these men, all the 
milHons of them, are reincorporated in civil 
life?" I asked. 

"What will happen to myself?" he replied. 
" I often think of that. I suppose I shall go on 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 155 

writing, but I know I shall write in a new way. 
I hope I shan't have lost the sense of romance, 
but I think it will be romance seen from a totally 
different angle. It will be the romance of 
virtue, using the word in the strict Latin sense 
•■ — not the romance of man's weaknesses, but 
of his strength. It will be the austere romance 
which recognises in man's struggle for spiritual 
mastership a far more fascinating theme than 
his mean adventures in the conflicts of sex, 
which leave him with a dirty mind and a dis- 
honoured soul." 

He sat silent and thoughtful for a moment, 
and then said, 

" But I suppose what you're thinking of is 
what effect will the return of all these men to 
civil life have upon society, and upon religion. 
As regards the first, there is nothing to be feared, 
but a great deal to be anticipated. Pessimists 
who talk gloomily about the prospects of lawless- 
ness when the army is disbanded talk like fools, 
as all pessimists do, because they won't trust hu- 
man nature. The vast majority of the men will 
return to the occupations they have left. A good 
many won't go back to sedentary tasks — they 
have tasted a free Hfe in the open, and they'll 
turn their backs on cities and find their way to 
the prairies and the mountains. I don't remem- 



156 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

ber that there was any serious detriment to 
society after the American Civil War. The great 
leaders became captains of industry, and so forth, 
and the greatest became President of the United 
States. The rank and file brought with them 
habits of discipline which m.ade them capable of 
doing better work than they'd ever done before. 
The same thing v/ill happen after this wr.r. The 
returning soldier will be an asset to society of 
immense value. 

" But he's going to bring new ideals with him, 
be sure of thnt. He will be a thousandfold more 
democratic than vvhen he enlisted. He'll have 
learned the great lesson of valuing men for what 
they are, not for what they have. And this les- 
son, which he has learned in the naked contact 
of his ovvn soul with other souls, is going to have 
its effect on popular forms of religion. He 
won't be accessible to the old selfish motive of 
getting his ovvai soul saved, as the for aula of 
religion. He has learned too thoroughly the 
prime ethic of a soldier's life, that his first busi- 
ness is to think of others before himself. And 
he v/on't have any use for a little unheroic re- 
ligion that makes no call for real sacrifice. If 
the church can get rid of her pettiness, and offer 
him a big job that's worth doing, she'll recrti't 
him; if she can't she'll lose him. And I'm quite 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 157 

sure he won't pay the least attention to creeds 
and dogmas. They won't interest him. He's 
been accustomed to measure men by deeds, not 
words, and he'll go on doing it. War has burned 
out the unrealities for him, and he will look for 
a religion that is real. If he can find it, he'll 
embrace it; if the Church has nothing to offer 
him but pietistic camouflage, he'll go off on his 
own road, and either disdain the conventional 
Church, or perhaps establish a new Church of 
his own. That's a great idea, isn't it — a Sol- 
dier's Church ! But it has sense in it. Don't we 
speak of the Church Militant? Only the last 
feature of the Church as we know it is militancy. 
Is that answer to your question?" 

I owned that it was ; and as I reflected on it, I 
began to see a dawning vision of the regenerating 
work of War. I saw War not only as destruc- 
tive, but as creative; I saw it as a powerful sol- 
vent, in which old forms of thought and life were 
dissolved, but also as a crystallising force, com- 
bining into new forms the latent spiritualities of 
men. 

" There's a passage of Emerson's," I said, 
" which you've often heard me quote. He is 
speaking of the Civil War, which, to a man like 
himself of philosophic mind and quiet literary 
habits, was an unspeakable calamity. Yet this is 



158 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

what he says: *I shall always respect War 
hereafter. The waste of life, the dreary havoc 
of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas 
it opens of Eternal Life, Eternal Law, recon- 
structing and upbuilding society/ '* 

" Yes, that's profoundly true," he said. " I 
used to think when I heard you quote those 
words that it was easy for us to be optimistic 
about the results of a suffering which we'd never 
endured. Well, Fve endured it, and I believe. 
You have endured it too, you three lonely folk 
who tarry by the stuff, and you also know that 
Emerson is right. Fm glad you've reminded me 
of Emerson, for when I left for my first experi- 
ence of war, you quoted in your first letter to 
me Emerson's lines: 

Though love repine and reason chafe, 
There came a voice without reply, 

'Tis man's perdition to be safe 
When for the truth he ought to die. 

Those lines have been often in my mind, and it 
is because I believed them, and acted on them, 
that I can believe the much harder saying that 
the havoc of war is overpaid by its spiritual re- 
sults. I don't think a soldier could find a better 
creed than these two passages of Emerson sup- 
ply. Nor," he concluded with a smile, "a sol- 
dier's parents and a soldier's sister." 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR ^59 



III 

So I have seen the Happy Warrior, not 
through the eyes of Wordsworth, but with my 
own, and I ask myself am I also happy? 

If freedom from anxiety and care is neces- 
sary to happiness, then I am not happy, nor am 
likely to be. But if happiness springs from 
within, in the conscious acceptance of the highest 
duty which the soul can recognise, then I am 
happy. My most acute unhappiness was in the 
period of indecision and debate, when the highest 
duty was discerned but resented. From the hour 
when the duty was accepted, I found in myself 
the beginnings of a true peace. The peace so 
won has broadened like a slow sunrise on the 
heart. The spectres of the dark have withdrawn. 
As the light has spread I have seen things in their 
true relations, and have found myself the habi- 
tant of a world much more beautiful than I sus- 
pected. With each step of the way the path has 
become less difficult, and the rewards of sacri- 
fice more real. I know now that had I grudged 
my sons to the greatest struggle for liberty and 
justice which the world has ever known, or had I 
withheld myself from my humble part in that 
struggle, I should have forever forfeited my right 



i6o THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

to happiness. I know also that in giving all I 
had I have gained much more than I have lost. 
I have found the Garden of Peace that lies on the 
other side of the hill called Calvary — 

I am one with my kind, 
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned. 

As I close this book, there comes to me a letter 
from Coningsby, the second written since he left 
New York on October the twenty- fourth, 19 17. 

" Nearing England, 
" November 3rd, 191 7. 
" Dearest Father : 

** All this week Eve been picturing you writing 
in your study — and I very much hope that 
you've been writing The Father of a Soldier. 
I'm sure that you have the chance of doing a book 
which is good for all time. It's never been done 
by anybody. One grows accustomed to the 
vision of courage by gradual stages. Once the 
bravery of a soldier formed a riddle to whose an- 
swer we found no clue. I think we all, in a more 
or less degree, understand that now. 

'* The soldier is trained to obey : not to obey 
is a calamity worse than death. That's the ex- 
planation at its lowest. But the more spiritual 
courage of those who see their men march out, 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR i6i 

and are forced themselves to stay behind, is still 
baffling to unheroic minds. People, like your- 
selves, know all the risks to which your men are 
going; Imagination keeps a magic lantern con- 
tinually at work in the silence of the brain. Its 
pictures are facts, and graphic. I don't wonder 
that onlookers marvel that you can be thankful 
that you are represented in the fighting, and can 
even smile. Your courage has to be much greater 
than mine. I mean that there must have been 
people like you and Mother and Muriel behind the 
lines of all the battlefields of time; no one has 
ever spoken for them ; they've never been repre- 
sented. In the old days of fighting, one pitched 
battle would decide the issue — the suspense was 
soon ended. And then, again, the danger to non- 
combatants was almost as great as to the fighters. 
They could watch the battle from their city walls ; 
if their men failed, the city would be sacked that 
night. 

"With you it's different; the suspense is long 
dragged out, and you have no immediate threat 
against your own persons, which would help to 
make you grateful that your men are fighters. 
We slip away into the anonymous hell of the 
War-zone; you don't even know where we are, 
and we're not allowed to tell you what we're 
doing. We leave you in your old comfortable 



i62 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

environment, with only the miss of our presence, 
and no menace against your own peace to stimu- 
late a self-interested courage. I don't think 
there was ever a time in the world's history when 
the lot of those who v/ait was harder. Even the 
Mother of Jesus knew where her Son was buried. 
And yet there was never a time when the smiling 
of * the tarriers by the stuff ' was more sincere 
or more pathetic. If people are wondering to- 
day how the thing is done, they will wonder more 
to-morrow. 

" To-morrow, with luck, I shall see dear old 
Reggie. We'll have heaps to talk about. I seem 
a good deal of a cheat when I think of those two 
boys. The war has benefited me so much more 
than it has them, and they were willing to give 
up just as much. 

" You're in your pulpit now at the morning 
service. I wish I was there. It seems like re- 
membering a fairy-tale — those evening services 
with you and the packed audiences. It was really 
to you that I was talking all the time. I've 
wanted — always wanted so much — to give you 
the real picture of what we do and feel out there. 
I'm not sure that it's possible, for one doesn't 
feel the same all the time — the mud dims the 
clearness of one's sight. The war is very won- 
derful — it's like that parable of the valley of 



THE HAPPY WARRIOR 163 

dead bones — out of our murdered hopes there 
has come the most vital kind of Hfe." 



He remembered that this letter would probably 
reach me on my birthday, and his mind recalls 
the birthday poem I wrote to him when he was a 
little child. He answers it thus : 

"A DREAM COME TRUE 

" I used to say ' When I'm a man 
ril he a soldier if I can.' 
Then you my mettled steed would be 
And prance me round the nursery. 

"Each Sabbath down the silvered street 
The red-coats marched with martial feet; 
All week, with nose pressed to the pane, 
I wished that Sunday' d come again. 

" When gloaming into night had turned, 
And marigolds of gas-lamps burned. 
Safe in your arms mad risks I'd take 
On magic voyagings with Drake. 

"Seated within the Hrelight's glow 
Through all the seven seas we'd plough, 
Sacking the highwaymen of Spain — 
Then home to London town again. 

"Little we thought, we little knew 
That these, our dream-times, would come true. 
You made my soul a sword at play —? 
Your son's a Soldier-Man to-day. 



i64 THE FATHER OF A SOLDIER 

** I woke at 4:30 in the morning, just as we 
were sailing into England. I was thinking of 
you and the old days, and couldn't get to sleep 
again. So I wrote this little poem. Perhaps 
you might like to use it in your Soldier-book." 



THE END 



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